ext 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:--

"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