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.