"All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist,"
and even the argument that makes "Our failure here but a triumph's evidence."
"Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear, Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe: But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; The rest may reason and welcome; 'tis we musicians know."
"Musicians" is used in a suggestive sense to indicate mystics and idealists.
The argument of the monologue, accordingly, is found in dramatic sequence of natural thinking. It is not a logical or systematic arrangement of points, but the association of ideas as they spring up in the mind.
As has been shown, the start is everything, since it indicates the connection of the speaker with the unwritten situation or preceding thought of his listener. The argument then follows naturally.
The argument of "A Death in the Desert" is one of the most complex and difficult to follow. Browning opens and closes the poem with a bracketed passage, and inserts one also in another place. These bracketed lines are written or said by another than Pamphylax, the speaker in the main part of the monologue. They refer to the old fragments and parchments with their methods of enumeration by Greek letters. This gives the impression and feeling of the ancient documents and the peculiar difficulties in the criticism of the texts of the New Testament, upon which so much of the evidence of Christianity depends. Pamphylax gives in the monologue an account of the death of John, the beloved disciple, who was supposed to have been the last man who had actually seen the Christ with his own eyes. It occurs in the midst of the persecution which came about this time. The dying John is in the cave, near Ephesus, with a boy outside pretending to care for the sheep, but ready to give warning of the approach of Roman soldiers. The speaker, who was present, describes all that happened, and repeats the words of the dying apostle. Browning makes John foresee that the evidences of Christianity would no longer depend upon simply "I saw," as there would be no one left when John was dead who could say it. He thus makes him foresee all the critical difficulties of modern times in relation to the evidences of Christianity, and, in the spirit of John's gospel and of the whole philosophy of that time, as well as with a profound understanding of the needs of the nineteenth century, he makes John unfold a solution of the difficulties.