not an impelling and consuming fire. The more potent passion of Luria
and his lieutenant Husain is more adequately rendered, though "the
simple Moorish instinct" in them is made to accomplish startling feats
in European subtlety. The East with its gift of "feeling" comes once
more, as in the _Druses_, into tragic contact with the North and its
gift of "thought"; but it is to the feeling East and not to thinking
North that we owe the clear analysis and exposition of the contrast.
Luria has indeed, like Djabal, assimilated just so much of European
culture as makes its infusion fatal to him: he suffers the doom of the
lesser race

"Which when it apes the greater is forgone."

But the noblest quality of the lesser race flashes forth at the close
when he takes his life, not in defiance, nor in despair, but as a last
act of passionate fidelity to Florence. This is conceived with a
refinement of moral imagination too subtle perhaps for appreciation on
the stage; but of the tragic power and pathos of the conception there
can be no question. Mrs Browning, whose eager interest accompanied this
drama through every stage of its progress, justly dwelt upon its
"grandeur." The busy exuberance of Browning's thinking was not
favourable to effects which multiplicity of detail tends to destroy; but
the fate of this son of the "lone and silent East," though utterly
un-Shakespearean in motive, recalls, more nearly than anything else in
Browning's dramas, the heroic tragedy of Shakespeare.

[Footnote 22: Browning himself uses this parallel in almost his first
reference to _Luria_ while still unwritten: _Letters of R.B. and
E.B.B._, i. 26.]