The Study of Poetry • Paragraph 1866
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To this effect argues the prophet John in ‘A Death in the Desert’, anticipating with the deep prevision of a dying man the doubts and questionings of modern days. And in the third of those remarkable poems which form the epilogue of the ‘Dramatis Personae’, the whole world rises in the speaker’s imagination into one vast spiritual temple, in which voices of singers, and swell of trumpets, and cries of priests are heard going up to God no less truly than in the old Jewish worship, while the face of Christ, instinct with divine will and love, becomes apparent, as that of which all nature is a type or an adumbration.” --Prof. Edward Dowden in his Comparative Study of Browning and Tennyson (Studies in Literature, 1789-1877). --