I know not too well how I found my way home in the night. There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right, Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware: I repressed, I got through them as hardly, as strugglingly there, As a runner beset by the populace famished for news-- Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed with her crews; And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot {320} Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but I fainted not, For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported, suppressed All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest, Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest. Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth-- Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day’s tender birth; In the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the hills; In the shuddering forests’ held breath; in the sudden wind-thrills; In the startled wild beasts that bore oft, each with eye sidling still Though averted with wonder and dread; in the birds stiff and chill {330} That rose heavily as I approached them, made stupid with awe: E’en the serpent that slid away silent--he felt the new law. The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the flowers; The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the vine-bowers: And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low, With their obstinate, all but hushed voices--“E’en so, it is so!” -- 320 et seq.: see note to St. 37, 38, of ‘By the Fireside’. A Death in the Desert. {Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene: It is a parchment, of my rolls the fifth, Hath three skins glued together, is all Greek And goeth from Epsilon down to Mu: Lies second in the surnamed Chosen Chest, {5} Stained and conserved with juice of terebinth, Covered with cloth of hair, and lettered Xi, From Xanthus, my wife’s uncle, now at peace: Mu and Epsilon stand for my own name. I may not write it, but I make a cross {10} To show I wait His coming, with the rest, And leave off here: beginneth Pamphylax.} -- 1-12. The bracketed prefatory lines, explanatory of the parchment on which are recorded the last hours and last talk of St. John with his devoted attendants, purport to have been written by one who was at the time the owner of the parchment. It appears to have come into his possession through his wife, a niece of the Xanthus who, with Pamphylax of Antioch, the supposed author of the narrative (he having told it on the eve of his martyrdom to a certain Phoebas, v. 653), and two others, is represented therein as waiting on the dying apostle, and who afterwards “escaped to Rome, was burned, and could not write the chronicle.” (vv. 56, 57.) 4. And goeth from Epsilon down to Mu: the reference is to some numbering on the parchment. 6. terebinth: the turpentine tree. --