And now he takes up the last point of the King’s letter, that he, the King, holds joy not impossible to one with artist-gifts, who leaves behind living works. Looking over the sea, as he writes, he says, “Yon rower with the moulded muscles there, lowering the sail, is nearer it that I.” He presents with clearness, and with rigid logic, the DILEMMA of the growing soul; shows the vanity of living in works left behind, and in the memory of posterity, while he, the feeling, thinking, acting man, shall sleep in his urn. The horror of the thought makes him dare imagine at times some future state unlimited in capability for joy, as this is in DESIRE for joy. But no! Zeus had not yet revealed such a state; and alas! he must have done so were it possible! He concludes, “Live long and happy, and in that thought die, glad for what was! Farewell.” And then, as a matter of minor importance, he informs the King, in a postscript, that he cannot tell his messenger aright where to deliver what he bears to one called Paulus. Protos, it must be understood, having heard of the fame of Paul, and being perplexed in the extreme, has written the great apostle to know of his doctrine. But Cleon writes that it is vain to suppose that a mere barbarian Jew, one circumcised, hath access to a secret which is shut from them, and that the King wrongs their philosophy in stooping to inquire of such an one. “Oh, he finds adherents, who does not. Certain slaves who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ, and, as he gathered from a bystander, their doctrines could be held by no sane man.” There is a quiet beauty about this poem which must insinuate itself into the feelings of every reader. In tone it resembles the ‘Epistle of Karshish, the Arab Physician’. The verse of both poems is very beautiful. No one can read these two poems, and ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, and ‘The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church’, and not admit that Browning is a master of blank verse in its most difficult form--a form far more difficult than that of the epic blank verse of Milton, or the Idyllic blank verse of Tennyson, argumentative and freighted with thought, and, at the same time, almost chatty, as it is, and bearing in its course exquisitely poetical conceptions. The same may be said of much of the verse of ‘The Ring and the Book’, especially that of the monologues of the Canon Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope, and Count Guido Franceschini. But this by the way.