Part 8 (2/2)
”So I looked resolutely on her (for she wore the garb of woain she said irdle upwards, all was gorgeous, glistening, andflowers, but brighter and sweeter than those of earth; flowing tresses, blacker than the shadows cast by the bursting of a s of light, fell in clusters on her fair bosom; her lips were curled with the expression ofsmiles; and the lustre of her terrible eyes, like suns flashi+ng darkness, did bewilder me and blind my reason:--Then I veiled ain she said, 'Consider:'--and bending all my mind to the hazard, I encountered with calh they burned into my brain Bound about her sable locks was as it were a chaplet of fire; her right hand held a double-edged sword of e was of keen steel, and the other as it were the strip of a peacock's feather; on the face of the air about her were phantolossy shoulders waved and quivered large dazzling wings of iridescent colours, rew she slowly to ain she irdle upon her flowing robes: and behold they were of dis surface fluttered fearful visions: I discerned blood-spots on the from the darker folds, and, when these rustled, were heard stifled s, and smothered shrieks as of horror: and I noted that she stood upon a wreath of lightnings, that darted about like a nest of young snakes in theinwards as thick sain to me, 'Dost thou not know me?'--and I answered her,--'O Wonder, terrible in thy beauty, thy fairness have I seen in drea spirit that thou walkest a fears; are thou not that dread Pohoination?'--And she s, 'Yea, my son:' and her srew bold in my love and said, 'O Wonder, I would learn of thee; show ht, that I may worshi+p thy fair majesty in secret'
”Then she stood like a Goddess and a queen, and stretching forth her ar with circlets, slowly beckoned with her sword to the points of the dial There was a distant rushi+ng sound, and I sahite clouds afar off dropping suddenly and together from the blue firmament all round me in a circle: and they fell to the earth, and rolled onwards, fearfully converging to where I stood; and they ca in on all sides as huge cataracts of foareen social world with the awful curtains of the skies--Then, asat those inevitable strange oncos, and the fixt eyes of my queenlike mistress, I sent reason from his throne on e
”So stood I alone with that dread beauty by the dial, and the white rolling wall of cloud cas, and the island of earth on which I stood grew sarden-flowers faded away, and the fa bases of those cold mist-lorious Power, standing in stature as a giant,--'Come! why tarriest thou? Coolden throne of light filigree-work, borne upon seven pinions, whereof each was fledged above with feathers fair and white, but underneath they were ribbed batlike, and fringed with black down: and all around fluttered beautiful winged faces, ures and hideous imps Then she mounted in her poain she said to me, 'Come!'--and I feared her, for her voice was terrible; so I threw olden steps, and the border of her dark robe touched me Then was I full of dread, heether, and we rushed upward like a flame, and the hurricane hastened after us:in hty Power on her throne; but she spurned me with her black-sandalled foot, and I was thrust fro clutched at the silver net-work that lay upon the steps as a carpet,--and so I hung; le's talons, , the bones of my body ached, and I heard the chill whisper of Death (who caon, though swinging fearfully fro throne; for my mind was unsubdued, and ainst his mandate And so the pinions flapped away, the dreadful cavalcade of clouds folloe broke the waterspout, raced the ind, hunted the thunder to his caverns, rushed through the light and wind-tost mountains of the snow, pierced with a crash the thick sea of ice, that like a globe of hollow glass separates earth and its ath the airless void, lighted on another world
”Then triumphed h alone, and boldly upbraided the dread Power that had brought me thither,--'Traitress, thou hast not conquered; my mind is still thy master, and if the weaker body failedskies: I am immortal as thou art; yet shalt thou fear s: wherefore hast thou dared--?' butbeauty, and I had no tongue to chide, as she said in the sobriety of loveliness,--'My son, have I not answered thy prayer? yet but in part; behold, I have good store of precious things to show thee:' with that, she kissed my brow, and I fell into an ecstasy
”I perceived that I was codom of disembodied spirits, and they crowded aroundwith earnest looks, perchance to inquire of h ih each other, transparent and half-invisible, each wore the outward shape and seearments he had mostly been known by upon earth: and my reason whispered me, this is so, until the resurrection; the seen iven to the world, but the glorified body of each shall be as diverse froeous tulip fro, or the spreading beech froination stood with , 'Knowest thou any of these?'--and I answered, 'Millions upon millions, a widespread inundation of shadowy forms, from martyred Abel to the still-born babe of this hour I behold the gathered dead; millions upon millions, like the leaves of the western forests, like the blades of grass upon the prairie, they are here crowding innu held sweet converse with their minds in books; only this boon, sweet race cull me mine intimates, that I may see them even with my bodily eyes' So she smiled, and waved her fair hand: and at once, a few, a very few, not all worthiest, not all best, came nearer to me with looks of love; and I knew them each one, for I had met and somewhile walked with each of them in the paths of meditation; and some appeared less beatified than others, and soarments all of earth, yet I loved theh not equally, nor yet all for merit, but in that I had sympathy with these as ue, so that I stood entranced by the language of the spirits Then said uide, 'Hast thou no word for each of these? they love thy greeting, and would hear thee' But I answered, 'Alas, beautiful Power, I know but the language of earth, and ue: how should I worthily address these great ones?'--So with her finger she touched e of spirits, where the thoughts are as incense to the ed music to the ear, and the heart is dissolved into streams of joy, as hail that hath wandered to the tropics: in sweetness I communed with thee thing, changing the aspect of my vision It appeared to ment inquireth not and reason hath no power to rebuke it, that while I was still speaking unto those great ones, the several greetings I had poured forth inlava frohty cubes of crystal; and in the , like a soul, in characters of fire So I looked in adhts, and while I looked, behold, the shi+ningof themselves into a fair pyramid: and I saw that its eastern foot was shrouded in a mist, and the hither western foot stood out clear and well defined, and the topstone in the lorious than the rest, and inscribed with a naht not be uttered; for whereas all the re step by step as the self-built pile greondrously, this only had appeared to drop from above, neither had I welcomed the name it bore in that land of spirits; nevertheless, I had perceived the footolden sands of that bright world, and had worshi+pped them in silence with a welcome
”Thus then stood before me theheavenly praise; and I gloried in it as rew fas, for uide, I said, 'O Lady; were it not ill, I would tell e matters, and of thy favour, and of the love all these have shown s and lorious Wonder drew back , 'Not so, presureetings thou hast heard, and the songs ith I filled thee, cannot worthily be told in other than the language of spirits: and where is the alphabet of ue,--or how shouldst thou from henceforth, or thy fellows upon earth, attain to its delicate conceptions? behold, all these thine intimates are wroth with thee; they discern evil upon thy soul: the place of their sojourn is too pure for thee'
”Then was there a peal of thunder, like the bursting of a world, whereupon all that restless sea of shadows, and their bright abode, vanished suddenly; and there ensued a flood of darkness, peopled with shoaling fears, and I heard the approach of hurrying sounds, with de as for , 'Cast out! Cast out!' and it rushed up to me like an unseen army, and I fled for life before it, until I cae of that spiritual world, where, as I ran looking backwards for terror at those viewless hunters, I leaped horribly over the unguarded cliff, and fell whirling, whirling, whirling, until my senses failed me--
”When I ca upon the pedestal, and the thin shadow still pointed to twelve
”In astonishment, I ran hastily to my chamber, and strove to remember the strains I had heard But, alas! they had all passed away: scarcely one disjointed note of that rare ered in myreainst that fearful Power, and deprived of her wonted aid: s, invita Minerva, are but bald translations of those heavenly welco the visioned apotheosis of that of a Cephren, bears an unambitious likeness to theits presumptuous motto, must be veiled in one word from Herodotus (2-136),--alas! for the bathos of translation, the cabalistic--[Greek: phelikos], 'built up of mud'
”Was not Rome lutea as well as marmorea? and is not beautiful Paris anciently Lutetia, with its tile-sheds for Tuileries, and a Bourbe-bonne for its Sovereign?”
All these sonnets, with others, were published by me elsewhere, as I state further on The volume also contains some of oras, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, &c And here I will give a chance speciint of Worthies,” to each one of whoe or two of explanatory prose besides his fourteen lines of poetry Take my sonnet on ”Sylva” Evelyn:--
”Wotton, fair Wotton, thine ancestral hall, Thy green fresh meadows, coursed by ductile strea adown the frequent waterfall, Thy princely forest, and cal lake Are hallowed spots and classic precincts all; For in thy terraced walks and beechen grove The gentle, generous Evelyn wont to rove, Peace-lover, who of nature's garden spake Frohteous spirit, fall'n on evil times, Thy loyal zeal and learned piety Blest all around thee, wept thy country's criht the world how Christians live and die”
The sonnet is a form of metrical composition which has been habitual with o to prove; and I have written quite a hundred more The best always come at a burst, spontaneously and as it were inspirationally A laboured sonnet is a dull piece of artificial rhys not from the heart of the writer, fails to reach the heart of the reader If the metal does not flow out quick and hot, there never can be a sharp casting Good sonnets are crystals of the heart andto end, and are only unpopular where poetastersthem a spiritual pleasure But one who knows his the; for instance, see that striking article on Shakespeare's sonnets in a recent _Fortnightly_ (or was it a _Contemporary_?) by Charles Mackay, himself one of our literary worthiest, who has so orked through a long life for his country and his kind: enious hypothesis, quite new to me, is, that some of the one hundred and fifty-four in that collection are by other writers than Shakespeare, though falsely printed under his nah by him) ritten impersonately in the characters of Essex and Elizabeth; which would account for an aard confusion of the sexes hitherto inexplicable Mackay thinks that the publisher included any sonnets by others which he thought worthy of the great bard, as if they were his, and so caused the injurious and wrong appropriation; most of them are exquisite, and many undoubtedly Shakespeare's; so too, not one of all the one hundred and fifty-four is of the conventional and elaborate fourteen-liner sort, with coehteen are all of the ently made his rees ina short memoir of rew out of the ”Modern Pyramid”
CHAPTER XIV
AN AUTHOR'S MIND: PROBABILITIES
My next book, published by Bentley in 1841, is in so ”An Author's Mind, the Book of title-pages;” and when I add that it contains in succession sketches of thirty-four new brain-children, all struggling together for exit froined how impelled I was to write them all down (fixt, however briefly, in black and white) in order to get rid of them
The book is printed as ”edited” by me; whereas I wrote every word of it, but had not then the courage to say so, as certain things therein ht well have offended soive here a bit of the prefatory ”Raht-box must have been a most wholesome, a most necessary relief:--