'We have them; but I know not any tone
So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow;
Dost think men would go mad without a moan,
If they knew any way to borrow
A pathos like thine own?'"
The splendid lines assail her.[263:1] In her anguish of response she turns from them at last—they are too much. This power of perception is almost a baseness! And bitterly resentful of the young diviner who can thus show forth her inmost woe with his phrase of "love, at last aware of scorn," she flings the volume from her—rejecting him, detesting him, and finding ultimately through her stung sense the way to refute him who has dared, with his mere boy's eyes, to discern such anguish. He is wrong: the wind does not mean what he fancies by its moaning. He thus interprets it, because he thinks only of himself, and of how the suffering of others—failure, mistake, disgrace, relinquishment—is but the example for his use, the help to his path untried! Such agonies as her own are mere instances for him to recognise and put into a phrase—like that one, which stings the spirit, and sets the heart to woe-fullest aching, and brims the eyes with bitter, bitterest tears. How dare he, with his crude boy's heart, embody grief like hers in words, how dare he know—and now her irony turns cruel:
"Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest!
Himself the undefeated that shall be:
Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test—
His triumph in eternity
Too plainly manifest!"
Of course he does not know! The wind means something else. And as the pain grows fainter, she finds it easier to forgive him. How could "the happy, prompt instinctive way of youth" discover the wind's secret? Only "the kind, calm years, exacting their accompt of pain" can mature the mind. This young poet, grown older, will learn the truth one day—on a midsummer morning, at daybreak, looking over some "sparkling foreign country," at its height of gloom and gloss. At its height—next minute must begin, then, the work of destruction; and what shall be the earliest sign? That very wind beginning among the vines:
"So low, so low, what shall it say but this?
'Here is the change beginning, here the lines
Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss
The limit time assigns.'" . . .
Change is the law of life: that is what the wind says.
"Nothing can be as it has been before;
Better, so call it, only not the same.
To draw one beauty into our hearts' core,
And keep it changeless! Such our claim;
So answered: Never more!
Simple? Why, this is the old woe of the world;
Tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die.
Rise with it then! Rejoice that man is hurled
From change to change unceasingly,
His soul's wings never furled!"