第99章

Up to this time he had spoken little, was depressed with a suffering to which he could give no name--not pain, he said--but such that he could rouse no mental effort to meet it: his endurance was passive altogether.This night his brain was more affected.He did not rave, but often wandered; never spoke nonsense, but many words that would have seemed nonsense to ordinary people: to Robert they seemed inspired.His imagination, which was greater than any other of his fine faculties, was so roused that he talked in verse--probably verse composed before and now recalled.He would even pray sometimes in measured lines, and go on murmuring petitions, till the words of the murmur became undistinguishable, and he fell asleep.

But even in his sleep he would speak; and Robert would listen in awe; for such words, falling from such a man, were to him as dim breaks of coloured light from the rainbow walls of the heavenly city.

'If God were thinking me,' said Ericson, 'ah! But if he be only dreaming me, I shall go mad.'

Ericson's outside was like his own northern clime--dark, gentle, and clear, with gray-blue seas, and a sun that seems to shine out of the past, and know nothing of the future.But within glowed a volcanic angel of aspiration, fluttering his half-grown wings, and ever reaching towards the heights whence all things are visible, and where all passions are safe because true, that is divine.Iceland herself has her Hecla.

Robert listened with keenest ear.A mist of great meaning hung about the words his friend had spoken.He might speak more.For some minutes he listened in vain, and was turning at last towards his book in hopelessness, when he did speak yet again: Robert's ear soon detected the rhythmic motion of his speech.

'Come in the glory of thine excellence;

Rive the dense gloom with wedges of clear light;And let the shimmer of thy chariot wheels Burn through the cracks of night.--So slowly, Lord, To lift myself to thee with hands of toil, Climbing the slippery cliff of unheard prayer!

Lift up a hand among my idle days--

One beckoning finger.I will cast aside The clogs of earthly circumstance, and run Up the broad highways where the countless worlds Sit ripening in the summer of thy love.'

Breathless for fear of losing a word, Robert yet remembered that he had seen something like these words in the papers Ericson had given him to read on the night when his illness began.When he had fallen asleep and silent, he searched and found the poem from which I give the following extracts.He had not looked at the papers since that night.

A PRAYER.

O Lord, my God, how long Shall my poor heart pant for a boundless joy?

How long, O mighty Spirit, shall I hear The murmur of Truth's crystal waters slide >From the deep caverns of their endless being, But my lips taste not, and the grosser air Choke each pure inspiration of thy will?

I would be a wind, Whose smallest atom is a viewless wing, All busy with the pulsing life that throbs To do thy bidding; yea, or the meanest thing That has relation to a changeless truth Could I but be instinct with thee--each thought The lightning of a pure intelligence, And every act as the loud thunder-clap Of currents warring for a vacuum.

Lord, clothe me with thy truth as with a robe.

Purge me with sorrow.I will bend my head, And let the nations of thy waves pass over, Bathing me in thy consecrated strength.

And let the many-voiced and silver winds Pass through my frame with their clear influence.

O save me--I am blind; lo! thwarting shapes Wall up the void before, and thrusting out Lean arms of unshaped expectation, beckon Down to the night of all unholy thoughts.

I have seen Unholy shapes lop off my shining thoughts, Which I had thought nursed in thine emerald light;And they have lent me leathern wings of fear, Of baffled pride and harrowing distrust;And Godhead with its crown of many stars, Its pinnacles of flaming holiness, And voice of leaves in the green summer-time, Has seemed the shadowed image of a self.

Then my soul blackened; and I rose to find And grasp my doom, and cleave the arching deeps Of desolation.

O Lord, my soul is a forgotten well;

Clad round with its own rank luxuriance;

A fountain a kind sunbeam searches for, Sinking the lustre of its arrowy finger Through the long grass its own strange virtue5Hath blinded up its crystal eye withal:

Make me a broad strong river coming down With shouts from its high hills, whose rocky hearts Throb forth the joy of their stability In watery pulses from their inmost deeps, And I shall be a vein upon thy world, Circling perpetual from the parent deep.

O First and Last, O glorious all in all, In vain my faltering human tongue would seek To shape the vesture of the boundless thought, Summing all causes in one burning word;Give me the spirit's living tongue of fire, Whose only voice is in an attitude Of keenest tension, bent back on itself With a strong upward force; even as thy bow Of bended colour stands against the north, And, in an attitude to spring to heaven, Lays hold of the kindled hills.

Most mighty One, Confirm and multiply my thoughts of good;Help me to wall each sacred treasure round With the firm battlements of special action.

Alas my holy, happy thoughts of thee Make not perpetual nest within my soul, But like strange birds of dazzling colours stoop The trailing glories of their sunward speed, For one glad moment filling my blasted boughs With the sunshine of their wings.

Make me a forest Of gladdest life, wherein perpetual spring Lifts up her leafy tresses in the wind.

Lo! now I see Thy trembling starlight sit among my pines, And thy young moon slide down my arching boughs With a soft sound of restless eloquence.

And I can feel a joy as when thy hosts Of trampling winds, gathering in maddened bands, Roar upward through the blue and flashing day Round my still depths of uncleft solitude.