"He holds on firmly to some thread of life-- ... Which runs across some vast distracting orb Of glory on either side that meagre thread, Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet-- The spiritual life around the earthly life: The law of that is known to him as this, His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. So is the man perplext 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:--