“The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? 
      So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too,—­
      So, through the thunder comes a human voice
      Saying, ‘O heart I made, a heart beats here!’
      Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!”

That words like these, intensely Johannine in conception, should seem to start naturally from a mind which just before has shrunk in horror from the idea of an approximation between God and that which He fashioned, is an extraordinary tour de force of dramatic portraiture.  Among the minor traits which contribute to it is one of a kind to which Browning rarely resorts.  The “awe” which invests Lazarus is heightened by a mystic setting of landscape.  The visionary scene of his first meeting with Karshish, though altogether Browningesque in detail, is Wordsworthian in its mysterious effect upon personality:—­

     “I crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills
      Like an old lion’s cheek teeth.  Out there came
      A moon made like a face with certain spots
      Multiform, manifold and menacing: 
      Then a wind rose behind me.”

A less formidable problem is handled in the companion study of Cleon.  The Greek mind fascinated Browning, though most of his renderings of it have the savour of a salt not gathered in Attica, and his choice of types shows a strong personal bias.  From the heroic and majestic elder art of Greece he turns with pronounced preference to Euripides the human and the positive, with his facile and versatile intellect, his agile criticism, and his “warm tears.”  It is somewhat along these lines that he has conceived his Greek poet of the days of Karshish, confronted, like the Arab doctor, with the “new thing.”  As Karshish is at heart a spiritual idealist, for all his preoccupation with drugs and stones, so Cleon, a past-master of poetry and painting, is among the most positive and worldly-wise of men.  He looks back over a life scored with literary triumphs, as Karshish over his crumbs of learning gathered at the cost of blows and obloquy.  But while Karshish has the true scholar’s dispassionate and self-effacing thirst for knowledge, Cleon measures his achievements with the insight of an epicurean artist.  He gathers in luxuriously the incense of universal applause,—­his epos inscribed on golden plates, his songs rising from every fishing-bark at nightfall,—­and wistfully contrasts the vast range of delights which as an artist he imagines, with the limited pleasures which as a man he enjoys.  The magnificent symmetry, the rounded completeness of his life, suffer a serious deduction here, and his Greek sense of harmony suffers offence as well as his human hunger for joy.  He is a thorough realist, and finds no satisfaction in contemplating what he may not possess.  Art itself suffers disparagement, as heightening this vain capacity of contemplation:—­

     “I know the joy of kingship:  well, thou art king!”