How comely a thing is affliction borne cheerfully, which is not
beyond the reach of the humblest of us. What is beauty? It is
these hard-bitten men singing courage to you from their tent;
it is the waves of their island home crooning of their deeds to you
who are to follow them. Sometimes beauty boils over and them spirits
are abroad. Ages may pass as we look or listen, for time is
annihilated. There is a very old legend told to me by Nansen the
explorer--I like well to be in the company of explorers--the legend
of a monk who had wandered into the fields and a lark began to sing.
He had never heard a lark before, and he stood there entranced until
the bird and its song had become part of the heavens. Then he went
back to the monastery and found there a doorkeeper whom he did not
know and who did not know him. Other monks came, and they were all
strangers to him. He told them he was Father Anselm, but that was
no help. Finally they looked through the books of the monastery,
and these revealed that there had been a Father Anselm there a
hundred or more years before. Time had been blotted out while
he listened to the lark.
That, I suppose, was a case of beauty boiling over, or a soul boiling
over; perhaps the same thing. Then spirits walk.
They must sometimes walk St. Andrews. I do not mean the ghosts
of queens or prelates, but one that keeps step, as soft as snow,
with some poor student. He sometimes catches sight of it.
That is why his fellows can never quite touch him, their best
beloved; he half knows something of which they know nothing--the
secret that is hidden in the face of the Monna Lisa. As I see him,
life is so beautiful to him that its proportions are monstrous.
Perhaps his childhood may have been overfull of gladness;
they don't like that. If the seekers were kind he is the one for
whom the flags of his college would fly one day. But the seeker
I am thinking of is unfriendly, and so our student is 'the lad
that will never be told.' He often gaily forgets, and thinks
he has slain his foe by daring him, like him who, dreading water,
was always the first to leap into it. One can see him serene,
astride a Scotch cliff, singing to the sun the farewell thanks
of a boy:
'Throned on a cliff serene Man saw the sun
hold a red torch above the farthest seas,
and the fierce island pinnacles put on
in his defence their sombre panoplies;
Foremost the white mists eddied, trailed and spun
like seekers, emulous to clasp his knees,
till all the beauty of the scene seemed one,
led by the secret whispers of the breeze.
'The sun's torch suddenly flashed upon his face
and died; and he sat content in subject night
and dreamed of an old dead foe that had sought
and found him;
a beast stirred bodly in his resting-place;
And the cold came; Man rose to his master-height,
shivered, and turned away; but the mists were
round him.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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