n death will restore his being to equilibrium; but now he is out of
harmony, for the soul knows more than the body and the body clouds the
soul."

"I probed this seeming indifference. 'Beast, to be so still and careless
when Rome is at the gates of thy town.' He merely looked with his large
eyes at me. Yet the man is not apathetic, but loves old and young, the
very brutes and birds and flowers of the field. His only impatience is
with wrongdoing, but he curbs that impatience."

At last Karshish tells, with many apologies for his foolishness, the
strangest thing of all. Lazarus thinks that his curer was God himself
who came and dwelt in flesh among those he had made, and went in and out
among them healing and teaching, and then died. "It is strange, but why
write of trivial matters when things of price call every moment for
remark? Forget it, my master, pardon me and farewell."

Then comes the postscript, that impression which, in spite of all his
knowledge, is left in Karshish's mind--

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!
Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!"--
The madman saith He said so; it is strange.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XII

_IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS RENAISSANCE_

The Imaginative Representations to be discussed in this chapter are
those which belong to the time of the Renaissance. We take a great leap
when we pass from Karshish and Cleon to Fra Lippo Lippi, from early
Christian times to the early manhood of the Renaissance. But these leaps
are easy to a poet, and Browning is even more at his ease and in his
strength in the fifteenth century than in the first.

We have seen with what force in _Sordello_ he realised the life and
tumult of the thirteenth century. The fourteenth century does not seem
to have attracted him much, though he frequently refers to its work in
Florence; but when the Renaissance in the fifteenth century took its
turn with decision towards a more open freedom of life and thought,
abandoning one after another the conventions of the past; when the moral
limits, which the Church still faintly insisted on, were more and more
with