RETROSPECT
I had travelled all day and was
tired, but I could not rest by the hearth in
the cottage on the hill. My heart was beating with too great an excitement.
After my year in the city I felt like a child who wickedly stays from home
through a long day, and who returns frightened and penitent at nightfall,
wondering whether it will be received with forgiveness by its mother. Would the
Mother of us all receive me again as one of her children? Would the winds with
wandering voices, be as before the evangelists of her love? Or would I feel like
an outcast amid the mountains, the dark valleys and the shining lakes? I knew if
benediction came how it would come. I would sit among the rocks with shut eyes,
waiting humbly as one waits in the antechambers of the mighty, and if the
invisible ones chose me as companion they would begin with a soft breathing of
their intimacies, creeping on me with shadowy affection like children who steal nigh to the
bowed head and suddenly whisper fondness in the ear before it has even heard a
footfall. So I stole out of the cottage and over the dark ridges to the place of
rocks, and sat down, and let the coolness of the night chill and still the fiery
dust in the brain. I waited trembling for the faintest touch, the shyest
breathing of the Everlasting within my soul, the sign of reception and
forgiveness. I knew it would come. I could not so desire what was not my own,
and what is our own we cannot lose. Desire is hidden identity. The darkness drew
me heavenward. From the hill the plains beneath slipped away grown vast and
vague, remote and still. I seemed alone with immensity, and there came at last
that melting of the divine darkness into the life within me for which I prayed.
Yes, I still belonged, however humbly, to the heavenly household. I was not
outcast. Still, though by a thread fine as that by which a spider hangs from the
rafters, my being was suspended from the habitations of eternity. I longed to
throw my arms about the hills, to meet with kisses the lips of the seraph wind.
I felt the gaiety of childhood springing up through weariness and age,
for to come into contact with that which is eternally young is to
have that childhood of the spirit it must attain ere it can be moulded by the
Magician of the Beautiful and enter the House of Many Mansions.
I had not always this intimacy with nature. I never felt a light in childhood
which faded in manhood into the common light of day, nor do I believe that
childhood is any nearer than age to this being. If it were so what would the
spirit have to hope for after youth was gone? I was not conscious in my boyhood
of any heaven lying about me. I lived in the city, and the hills from which aid
was to come to me were only a far flush of blue on the horizon. Yet I was drawn
to them, and as years passed and legs grew longer I came nearer and nearer until
at last one day I found myself on the green hillside. I came to play with other
boys, but years were yet to pass before the familiar places grew strange once
more and the mountains dense with fiery forms and awful as Sinai.
While the child is still in its mother's arms it is nourished by her, yet it
does not know it is a mother which feeds it. It knows later in whose bosom it
has lain. As the mother nourishes the body so the Mighty Mother nourishes
the soul. Yet there are but few who pay reverence where reverence is due, and
that is because this benign deity is like a mother who indulges the fancies of
her children. With some she imparts life to their own thoughts. Others she
endows with the vision of her own heart. Even of these last some love in
silence, being afraid to speak of the majesty which smiled on them, and others
deceived think with pride: "This vision is my own."
I was like these last for a long time. I was aged about sixteen or seventeen
years, when I, the slackest and least ideal of boys, with my life already made
dark by those desires of body and heart with which we so soon learn to taint our
youth, became aware of a mysterious life quickening within my life. Looking back
I know not of anything in friendship, anything I had read, to call this forth.
It was, I thought, self-begotten. I began to be astonished with myself, for,
walking along country roads, intense and passionate imaginations of another
world, of an interior nature began to overpower me. They were like strangers who
suddenly enter a house, who brush aside the doorkeeper, and who will not be
denied. Soon I knew they were the rightful owners and heirs of the house of the body, and the
doorkeeper was only one who was for a time in charge, who had neglected his
duty, and who had pretended to ownership. The boy who existed before was an
alien. He hid himself when the pilgrim of eternity took up his abode in the
dwelling. Yet, whenever the true owner was absent, the sly creature reappeared
and boasted himself as master once more.
That being from a distant country who took possession of the house began to
speak in a language difficult to translate. I was tormented by limitations of
understanding. Somewhere about me I knew there were comrades who were speaking
to me, but I could not know what they said. As I walked in the evening down the
lanes scented by the honeysuckle my senses were expectant of some unveiling
about to take place, I felt that beings were looking in upon me out of the true
home of man. They seemed to be saying to each other of us, "Soon they will
awaken; soon they will come to us again," and for a moment I almost seemed
to mix with their eternity. The tinted air glowed before me with intelligible
significance like a face, a voice. The visible world became like a
tapestry blown and stirred by winds behind it. If it would but raise for an instant I
knew I would be in Paradise. Every form on that tapestry appeared to be the work
of gods. Every flower was a word, a thought. The grass was speech; the trees
were speech; the waters were speech; the winds were speech. They were the Army
of the Voice marching on to conquest and dominion over the spirit; and I
listened with my whole being, and then these apparitions would fade away and I
would be the mean and miserable boy once more. So might one have felt who had
been servant of the prophet, and had seen him go up in the fiery chariot, and
the world had no more light or certitude in it with that passing. I knew these
visitations for what they were and named them truly in my fantasy, for writing
then in the first verses of mine which still seem to me to be poetry, I said of
the earth that we and all things were her dreams:
She is rapt in dreams divine.
Yet such is human nature that I still felt vanity as if this vision was mine,
and I acted like one who comes across the treasure-house of a king, and spends
the treasure as if it were his own. We may indeed have a personal wisdom, but
spiritual vision is not to speak of as ours any more than we can say at the
rising of the sun: "This glory is mine." By the sudden uprising of
such vanities in the midst of vision I was often outcast, and found myself in an
instant like those warriors of Irish legend, who had come upon a lordly house
and feasted there and slept, and when they woke they were on the barren
hillside, and the Faed Fia was drawn about that lordly house. Yet though the
imagination apprehended truly that this beauty was not mine, and hailed it by
its heavenly name, for some years my heart was proud, for as the beauty sank
into memory it seemed to become a personal possession, and I said "I
imagined this" when I should humbly have said, "The curtain was a
little lifted that I might see." But the day was to come when I could not
deny the Mighty Mother the reverence due, when I was indeed to know by what
being I had been nourished, and to be made sweet and mad as a lover
with the consciousness of her intermingling spirit.
As her clouds of beauty pass
On our glowing hearts they shine,
Mirrored there as in a glass.
Earth, whose dreams are we and they,
With her deep heart's gladness fills
All our human lips can say
Or the dawn-fired singer trills.
The sages of old found that at the close of intense meditation their being
was drawn into union with that which they contemplated. All desire tends to
bring about unity with the object adored, and this is no less true of spiritual
and elemental than of bodily desire; and I, with my imagination more and more
drawn to adore an ideal nature, was tending to that vital contact in which what
at first was apprehended in fantasy would become the most real of all things.
When that certitude came I felt as Dante might have felt after conceiving of
Beatrice close at his side and in the Happy World, if, after believing it a
dream, half hoping that it might hereafter be a reality, that beloved face
before his imagination grew suddenly intense, vivid and splendidly shining, and
he knew beyond all doubt that her spirit was truly in that form, and had
descended to dwell in it, and would be with him for evermore. So did I feel one
warm summer day lying idly on the hillside, not then thinking of anything but
the sunlight, and how sweet it was to drowse there, when, suddenly, I felt a
fiery heart throb, and knew it was personal and intimate, and started
with every sense dilated and intent, and turned inwards, and I
heard first a music as of bells going away, away into that wondrous underland
whither. as legend relates, the Danaan gods withdrew; and then the heart of the
hills was opened to me, and I knew there was no hill for those who were there,
and they were unconscious of the ponderous mountain piled above the palaces of
light, and the winds were sparkling and diamond clear, yet full of colour as an
opal, as they glittered through the valley, and I knew the Golden Age was all
about me, and it was we who had been blind to it but that it had never passed
away from the world.
