could not Wordsworth, and cannot we, call up the vision of that hour? and
has not its memory almost, or even altogether, the potency of its
presence? Is not the very thought of any certain flower enough to make me
believe in that flower--believe it to mean all it ever seemed to mean?
That _these_ eyes may never more rest upon it with the old delight, means
little, and matters nothing. I have other eyes, and shall have yet
others. If I thought, as so many have degraded themselves to think, that
the glory of things in the morning of love was a glamour cast upon the
world, no outshine of indwelling radiance, should I care to breathe one
day more the air of this or of any world? Nay, nay, but there dwells in
everything the Father hath made, the fire of the burning bush, as at home
in his son dwelt the glory that, set free, broke out from him on the
mount of his transfiguration. The happy-making vision of things that
floods the gaze of the youth, when first he lives in the marvel of
loving, and being loved by, a woman, is the true vision--and the more
likely to be the true one, that, when he gives way to selfishness, he
loses faith in the vision, and sinks back into the commonplace unfaith of
the beggarly world--a disappointed, sneering worshipper of power and
money--with this remnant of the light yet in him, that he grumbles at the
gloom its departure has left behind. He confesses by his soreness that
the illusion ought to have been true; he seldom confesses that he loved
himself more than the woman, and so lost her. He lays the blame on God,
on the woman, on the soullessness of the universe--anywhere but on the
one being in which he is interested enough to be sure it exists--his own
precious, greedy, vulgar self. Would I dare to write of love, if I did
not believe it a true, that is, an eternal thing!
It was a summer of exceptional splendour in which my eyes were opened to
“the glory of the sum of things.” It was not so hot of the sun as summers
I have known, but there were so many gentle and loving winds about, with
never point or knife-edge in them, that it seemed all the housework of
the universe was being done by ladies. Then the way the odours went and
came on those sweet winds! and the way the twilight fell asleep into the
dark! and the way the sun rushed up in the morning, as if he cried, like
a boy, “Here I am! The Father has sent me! Isn't it jolly!” I saw more
sun-rises that year than any year before or since. And the grass was so
thick and soft! There must be grass in heaven! And the roses, both wild
and tame, that grew together in the wilderness!--I think you would like
to hear about the wilderness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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