Browning, perhaps, linked his next poem, "The Strange Medical
Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician," with the calm
prologizing of the Hellenic goddess, by association of the "wise
pharmacies" of AEsculapius, with the inquisitive sagacity of
Karshish, "the not-incurious in God's handiwork." By this ordering
of the poems, the reader may now enjoy, at any rate, the contrasts
between three historic phases of wisdom in bodily ills: the phase
presented in the dependence of the old Greek healer upon simple
physical effects, soothing "with lavers the torn brow," and laying
"the stripes and jagged ends of flesh even once more"; and the
phases typified, on the one side, by the ingenious Arab, sire of the
modern scientist, whose patient correlation of facts and studious,
sceptical scrutiny of cause and effect are caught in the bud in the
diagnosis transmitted by Karshish to Abib, and, on the other side,
by the Nazarene physician, whose inspired secret of summoning out of
the believing soul of man the power to control his body--so baffled
and fascinated Karshish, drawing his attention in Lazarus to just
that connection of the known physical with the unknown psychical
nature which is still mystically alluring the curiosity of
investigators.

From the childlike, over-idealizing mood of Lazarus toward the God
who had succored him, inducing in him so fatalistic an indifference
to human concerns, there is but a step to the rapture of absolute
theology expressed in the person of Johannes Agricola. Such poems
as these put before the cool gaze of the present century the very
men of the elder day of religion. Their robes shine with an
unearthly light, and their abstracted eyes are hypnotized by the
effulgence of their own haloes. Yet the poet never fails to