That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait
    On purpose to make prized the life at large—­
    Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death,
    We burst there as the worm into the fly. 
    Who, while a worm still, wants his wings.  But no! 
    Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
    He must have done so, were it possible!

This is one only of Browning’s statements of what he held to be the fierce necessity for another life.  Without it, nothing is left for humanity, having arrived at full culture, knowledge, at educated love of beauty, at finished morality and unselfishness—­nothing in the end but Cleon’s cry—­sorrowful, somewhat stern, yet gentle—­to Protus,

    Live long and happy, and in that thought die,
    Glad for what was.  Farewell.

But for those who are not Cleon and Protus, not kings in comfort or poets in luxury, who have had no gladness, what end—­what is to be said of them?  I will not stay to speak of A Death in the Desert, which is another of these poems, because the most part of it is concerned with questions of modern theology.  St. John awakes into clear consciousness just before his death in the cave where he lies tended by a few disciples.  He foresees some of the doubts of this century and meets them as he can.  The bulk of this poem, very interesting in its way, is Browning’s exposition of his own belief, not an imaginative representation of what St. John actually would have said.  It does not therefore come into my subject.  What does come into it is the extraordinary naturalness and vitality of the description given by John’s disciple of the place where they were, and the fate of his companions.  This is invented in Browning’s most excellent way.  It could not be better done.

The next poem is the Epistle of Karshish, the Arab Physician, to his master, concerning his strange medical experience.  The time is just before the last siege of Jerusalem, and Karshish, journeying through Jericho, and up the pass, stays for a few days at Bethany and meets Lazarus.  His case amazes him, and though he thinks his interest in it unworthy of a man of science in comparison with the new herbs and new diseases he has discovered, yet he is carried away by it and gives a full account of it to his master.

I do not think that Browning ever wrote a poem the writing of which he more enjoyed.  The creation of Karshish suited his humour and his quaint play with recondite knowledge.  He describes the physician till we see him alive and thinking, in body and soul.  The creation of Lazarus is even a higher example of the imaginative power of Browning; and that it is shaped for us through the mind of Karshish, and in tune with it, makes the imaginative effort the more remarkable.  Then the problem—­how to express the condition of a man’s body and soul, who, having for three days according to the story as Browning conceives it lived consciously in the eternal and perfect world, has come back to dwell in this world—­was so difficult and so involved in metaphysical strangenesses, that it delighted him.