Since highest truth, man e’er supplied,
Was ever fable on outside. (ll. 925-926.)
This, too, left unrealized; hence failure also here.
(d) The search for sensuous and for intellectual satisfaction having alike failed, is there no refuge for him whose lot is earth in its fulness? Yes, there is Love, Love which we saw the soliloquist of Christmas Eve recognizing as the “sole good of life on earth.” So now the wearied soul recalls to mind, in the past,
How love repaired all ill,
Cured wrong, soothed grief, made earth amends
With parents, brothers, children, friends. (ll. 938-940.)
Hence the appeal for “leave to love only,” made in full confidence of the divine approval. In place of approval, however, falls the reproof of Section XXX: the warning that all now left to the petitioner is “the show of love,” since love itself has passed with the judgment. The “semblance of a woman,” “departed love,” “old memories,” now alone survive of that which might have been all in all to the soul during its life’s struggle. And here we find the man who has failed through a too exclusive devotion to things temporal taught, by this vision of the final judgment, the truth, at first accepted in Christmas Eve by the man who had looked through Nature to the God of Nature, and refused to worship in the “narrow shrines” of the temples made with hands. That love
Shall arise, made perfect, from death’s repose of it.
And I shall behold thee, face to face,
O God, and in thy light retrace
How in all I loved here, still wast thou![68]
Thus the voice of judgment before the Easter dawn—
All thou dost enumerate
Of power and beauty in the world,
The mightiness of love was curled
Inextricably round about.
Love lay within it and without,
To clasp thee. (ll. 960-965.)
But we saw the soliloquist of Christmas Eve ultimately rejecting this universal recognition of love in favour of the narrow shrine of Zion Chapel: acting, as he believed, with the divine approval. Again proof of the dramatic character of the poems. The lesson of life is variously interpreted by its different students.
Yet even here, where love is at length sought as the supreme good, the Voice of Easter Day proclaims once more—failure—and its cause, the inability to recognize the divine Love: the object of search is even now but human love.