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