s herbs and gums, of the insects which may help medicine--

There is a spider here
Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs,
Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back;

and then, how the countryside is all on fire with news of Vespasian
marching into Judaea. So we have the place, the village, the hills, the
animals, and the time, all clear, and half of the character of Karshish.
The inner character of the man emerges as clearly when he comes to deal
with Lazarus. This is not a case of the body, he thinks, but of the
soul. "The Syrian," he tells his master, "has had catalepsy, and a
learned leech of his nation, slain soon afterwards, healed him and
brought him back to life after three days. He says he was dead, and made
alive again, but that is his madness; though the man seems sane enough.
At any rate, his disease has disappeared, he is as well as you and I.
But the mind and soul of the man, that is the strange matter, and in
that he is entirely unlike other men. Whatever he has gone through has
rebathed him as in clear water of another life, and penetrated his whole
being. He views the world like a child, he scarcely listens to what goes
on about him, yet he is no fool. If one could fancy a man endowed with
perfect knowledge beyond the fleshly faculty, and while he has this
heaven in him forced to live on earth, such a man is he. His heart and
brain move there, his feet stay here. He has lost all sense of our
values of things. Vespasian besieging Jerusalem and a mule passing with
gourds awaken the same interest. But speak of some little fact, little
as we think, and he stands astonished with its prodigious import. If his
child sicken to death it does not seem to matter to him, but a gesture,
a glance from the child, starts him into an agony of fear and anger, as
if the child were undoing the universe. He lives like one between two
regions, one of distracting glory, of which he 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
whe