Louis— How?
Abbot—I hope that some free, some free spirit may win.
Not one wrapped round with ignorance, nor one
Bound hand and foot by cursed policy.
But I am not his foe.
Louis— But he is yours.
Abbot—Night does not understand.
Louis— I cannot see.
Abbot—Louis, the greatest man in this great world
Is he who sees all things are going right.
Yet fights as though all things were going wrong. (Louis shakes his head.)
I know you don't. But I can do no more
Than show my thought. To see it, must be yours.
Louis—Then Oswald's fall—
Abbot— Not if it gives him strength
To do the work his spirit bids him do,
To wrestle with the dark and with the bright,
To wrestle better than he did before.
And shake the fruit down of that prophesy.
Who knows what God behind the horizon holds
For Oswald till the dawning of that day?
I somehow feel the dream is, as it were,
The warp to which the prophesy is woof,
And that beneath the hills unseen a loom
Rocks as it weaves in dogs and storm and deer
And underneath the meaning of it all.
But I was speaking of the witch's son.
This pebble here I take up in my hand.
I turn it, yet I always see one side.
The other side is toward the underworld,
And though I turned it till the Judgment Day,
That side would still be round there. Bid it grow,
Swell to a bowlder's, now the chapel's size,
And now a globe's. And let us hold it thus.
Above us, on our palms. Like Atlas now
I stand supporting it. (Pointing as though under the globe.)
Down here I see
A little night following a little day
About a water-drop, a grain of sand,
A point in which my spirit lives and moves. (Reaching up and around.)
How do I know that up here are not worlds
Lit with Gods' providence and bathed with soul?
What is my thought that it should scale these zones
And take my law of good and evil there
And recreate that life to what I know?
Is my eye God's, that it should see all things?
From what far mountains come the grains of gold
That sparkle in the river of my soul?
Ranges of being and tall peaks of thought
May hold up here a brighter metal still,
Some burning thing would dry my river bed.
The dreams that vein the dark sky of our sleep,
As lightnings vein the night and then are gone,
Whence come they and whither go they, that they leave
Vast expectation and the vacant eye?
And out beyond the chalice of our sleep
That cases round my dew-drop soul, who knows
What oceans roar with life beyond our life,
And spray with stars the dark rocks of the void?
How do I know what creatures come and go
Beyond my little line of night and day,
Doing the will of the Eternal Mind?
I am not Benedict to say, "This is He,
And this is not."
Louis— Not even of the dwarf?
Abbot—God is the author of the book we see
Whose pages are the mountains and the stars.
Though He may sit aloof, his soul pervades
Each word and letter. Prowling in the spring,
The mountain lion feels Him in her paws,
And the wild creatures of the caves are His.