is conscious but must not enter yet; and the other into which he has been exiled back again—­and between this region where his soul moves and the earth where his body is, there is so little harmony of thought or feeling that he cannot undertake any human activity, nor unite the demands of the two worlds.  He knows that what ought to be cannot be in the world he has returned to, so that his life is perplexed; but in this incessant perplexity he falls back on prone submission to the heavenly will.  The time will come when death will restore his being to equilibrium; but now he is out of harmony, for the soul knows more than the body and the body clouds the soul.”

“I probed this seeming indifference.  ’Beast, to be so still and careless when Rome is at the gates of thy town.’  He merely looked with his large eyes at me.  Yet the man is not apathetic, but loves old and young, the very brutes and birds and flowers of the field.  His only impatience is with wrongdoing, but he curbs that impatience.”

At last Karshish tells, with many apologies for his foolishness, the strangest thing of all.  Lazarus thinks that his curer was God himself who came and dwelt in flesh among those he had made, and went in and out among them healing and teaching, and then died.  “It is strange, but why write of trivial matters when things of price call every moment for remark?  Forget it, my master, pardon me and farewell.”

Then comes the postscript, that impression which, in spite of all his knowledge, is left in Karshish’s mind—­

    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! 
    Thou hast no power, nor may’st conceive of mine,
    But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
    And thou must love me who have died for thee!”—­
    The madman saith He said so; it is strange.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XII

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS RENAISSANCE

The Imaginative Representations to be discussed in this chapter are those which belong to the time of the Renaissance.  We take a great leap when we pass from Karshish and Cleon to Fra Lippo Lippi, from early Christian times to the early manhood of the Renaissance.  But these leaps are easy to a poet, and Browning is even more at his ease and in his strength in the fifteenth century than in the first.