Art itself suffers disparagement, as heightening this vain capacity of contemplation:-- "I know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king!" With great ingenuity this Greek realism is made the stepping-stone to a conception of immortality as un-Greek as that of the Incarnation is un-Semitic.

Karshish shrank intuitively from a conception which fascinated while it awed; to Cleon a future state in which joy and capability will be brought again to equality seems a most plausible supposition, which he only rejects with a sigh for lack of outer evidence:-- "Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas, He must have done so, were it possible!" The little vignette in the opening lines finely symbolises the brilliant Greek decadence, as does the closing picture in Karshish the mystic dawn of the Earth.

Here the portico, flooded with the glory of a sun about to set, profusely heaped with treasures of art; there the naked uplands of Palestine, and the moon rising over jagged hills in a wind-swept sky.
In was in such grave _adagio_ notes as these that Browning chose to set forth the "intimations of immortality" in the meditative wisdom and humanity of heathendom.

The after-fortunes of the Christian legend, on the other hand, and the naive ferocities and fantasticalities of the medieval world provoked him rather to _scherzo_,--audacious and inimitable _scherzo_, riotously grotesque on the surface, but with a grotesqueness so penetrated and informed by passion that it becomes sublime.

_Holy-Cross Day_ and _The Heretic's Tragedy_ both culminate, like _Karshish_ and _Clean_, in a glimpse of Christ.