Wisdom Vault — onlinknow.co.za

of the other life has produced upon the resuscitated man. The poem should be studied as a whole; but for the present a few lines selected here and there must do duty to indicate the character of the change which has passed upon Lazarus.

After comparing him to a beggar who, having suddenly received boundless wealth, is unable to regulate its use to his requirements, Karshish continues:-- "So here--we call the treasure knowledge, say, Increased beyond the fleshly faculty-- Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven: The man is witless of the size, the sum, The value in proportion of all things."

In fact he has become almost exclusively conscious of "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," and the result is a loss of mental balance entirely unfitting him for the affairs of ordinary life.

Now there can be no doubt that Browning had a far more serious intention in writing this poem than just to record a fantastic notion that flitted through his brain. If we read between the lines, it must be clear from the general tenor of his writings that, however he may have acquired it, Browning had a very deep acquaintance with the inner region of spiritual causes which give rise to all that we see of outward phenomenal manifestation.

There are continual allusions in his works to the life behind the veil, and it is to this suggestion of some mystery underlying his words that we owe the many attempts to fathom his meaning expressed through Browning Societies and the like--attempts which fail or succeed according as they are made from "the without" or from "the within."

No one was better qualified than the poet to realise the immense benefits of the inner knowledge, and for the same reason he is also qualified to warn us of the dangers on the way to its acquisition; for nowhere is it more true that "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," and it is one of the greatest of these dangers that he points out in this poem.

Under the figure of Lazarus he describes the man who has practically grasped the reality of the inner side of things, for whom the veil has been removed, and who knows that the external and visible takes its rise from the internal and spiritual.

But the description is that of one whose eyes have been so dazzled by the light that he has lost the power of accommodating his vision to the world of sense. He now commits the same error from the side of "the within" that he formerly committed from the side of "the without," the error of supposing that there is no vital reality in the aspect of things on which his thoughts are not immediately centered.

This is want of mental balance, whether it shows itself by refusing reality to the inward or the outward. To be so absorbed in speculative ideas as to be unable to give them practical application in daily life, is to allow our highest thoughts to evaporate in dreams.

There is a world of philosophy in the simple statement that there can be no inside without an outside, and no outside without an inside; and the great secret in life is in learning to see things in their wholeness, and to realise the inside and the outside simultaneously.