Yet Il Penseroso knew and L’Allegro did not.
Long-featured Sarah was on the Puritan side, with a strain of the artist, drawn from the other half, tormenting her. Eve, delicately and unscrupulously adventurous, was the west country side altogether.
Within me ... the third child, the longed-for son, the two natures, equally matched, mingle and fight? It is their struggle that keeps me adrift, so variously interested and strongly attracted, now here, now there? Which will win?... Feeling so identified with both, she could not imagine either of them set aside. Then her life would be the battle field of her two natures. Which of them had been thrilled through and through, so that she had seemed to enter, lightly waving her hand to all that had gone before, for good, into a firelit glow, the door closing behind her, and leaving her launched, without her belongings, but richly accompanied, on a journey to the heart of an unquenchable joy? It was not socialism that had drawn her, though the moment before, she had been, spontaneously a socialist, for the first time. The glow that had come with his words was still there, drawing her, an unfulfilled promise. She was still waiting to be, consciously, in league and everlasting company with others, a socialist. Yet the earlier lonely moment had been so far her only experience of the state; everything that had followed had been a slow gradual undoing of it.
What was the secret of the immense relief, the sense of being and doing in an unbounded immensity that had come with her dreamy sudden words? One moment sitting on the hearth-rug living in the magic of the woven text, feeling its message rise from the quiet firelit room, drive through the sound of the winter sea and out and away over the world, to everyone who had ears to hear; giving the power of hearing to those who had not, until they equally possessed it. And then hearing her own voice, like a whisper in the immensity, thrilled with the sense of a presented truth, coming given, suddenly, from nowhere, the glad sense of a shape whose denial would be death, and bringing as she dreamily followed its prompting, a willingness to suffer in its service.
“You ought to cut out the pathos in that passage.”
“Which passage, Miriametta?” The effort of throwing off the many distractions of the interested, mocking, critical voice.
“You weaken the whole argument by coming forward in those three words to tell your readers what they ought to feel. An enormous amount of time is lost, while attention is turned from the spectacle to yourself.”
“Yes. Which passage?”
“In the moment that the reader turns away, everything goes, and they come back distracted and different, having been racing all over their own world, perhaps indifferent.”
“Passage, passage——”