not more single-souled than this devoted “picker up of learning’s crumbs,” who makes nothing of perilous and toilsome journeys for the sake of his art, who is threatened by hungry wild beasts, stripped and beaten by robbers, arrested as a spy.  At every step his quick scrutiny is rewarded by the discovery of some new drug, mineral, or herb,—­“things of price”—­“blue flowering borage, the Aleppo sort,” or “Judaea’s gum-tragacanth.”  But Karshish has much of the temper of Browning himself:  these technicalities are the garb of a deep underlying mysticism.  This man’s flesh so admirably made by God is yet but the earthly prison for “that puff of vapour from his mouth, man’s soul.”  The case of Lazarus, though at once, as a matter of course, referred to the recognised medical categories, yet strangely puzzles and arrests him, with a fascination that will not be put by.  This abstracted docile man of perfect physical vigour, who heeds the approach of the Roman avenger as he would the passing of a woman with gourds by the way, and is yet no fool, who seems apathetic and yet loves the very brutes and the flowers of the field,—­compels his scrutiny, as a phenomenon of soul, and it is with the eye of a psychological idealist rather than of a physician that he interprets him:—­

     “He holds on firmly to some thread of life—­ ... 
      Which runs across some vast distracting orb
      Of glory on either side that meagre thread,
      Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet—­
      The spiritual life around the earthly life: 
      The law of that is known to him as this,
      His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. 
      So is the man perplext with impulses
      Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on,
      Proclaiming what is right and wrong across,
      And not along, this black thread through the blaze—­
      ‘It should be’ baulked by ‘here it cannot be.’”

Lazarus stands where Paracelsus conceived that he himself stood:  he “knows God’s secret while he holds the thread of life”; he lives in the glare of absolute knowledge, an implicit criticism of the Paracelsian endeavour to let in upon men the searing splendour of the unclouded day.  To Karshish, however, these very embarrassments—­so unlike the knowing cleverness of the spiritual charlatan—­make it credible that Lazarus is indeed no oriental Sludge, but one who has verily seen God.  But then came the terrible crux,—­the pretension, intolerable to Semitic monotheism, that God had been embodied in a man.  The words scorch the paper as he writes, and, like Ferishtah, he will not repeat them.  Yet he cannot escape the spell of the witness, and the strange thought clings tenaciously to him, defying all the evasive shifts of a trained mind, and suddenly overmastering him when his concern with it seems finally at an end—­when his letter is finished, pardon asked, and farewell said—­in that great outburst, startling and unforeseen yet not incredible:—­