One day, after an hour or two of bitterness, I wrote the following. A man’s trouble must have receded from him a little for the moment, if he descries any shape in it, so as to be able to give it form in words. I set it down with no hope of better than the vaguest sympathy. There came no music with this one.
If it be that a man and a woman
Are made for no mutual grief;
That each gives the pain to some other,
And neither can give the relief;
If thus the chain of the world
Is tied round the holy feet,
I scorn to shrink from facing
What my brothers and sisters meet.
But I cry when the wolf is tearing
At the core of my heart as now:
When I was the man to be tortured,
Why should the woman be thou?
I am not so ready to sink from the lofty in to the abject now. If at times I yet feel that the whole creation is groaning and travailing, I know what it is for—its redemption from the dominion of its own death into that sole liberty which comes only of being filled and eternally possessed by God himself, its source and its life.
And now I found also that my heart began to be moved with a compassion towards my fellows such as I had never before experienced. I shall best convey what I mean by transcribing another little poem I wrote about the same time.
Once I sat on a crimson throne,
And I held the world in fee;
Below me I heard my brothers moan,
And I bent me down to see;—
Lovingly bent and looked on them,
But I had no inward pain;
I sat in the heart of my ruby gem,
Like a rainbow without the rain.
My throne is vanished; helpless I lie
At the foot of its broken stair;
And the sorrows of all humanity
Through my heart make a thoroughfare.
Let such things rest for a while: I have now to relate another incident—strange enough, but by no means solitary in the records of human experience. My reader will probably think that of dreams and visions there has already been more than enough: but perhaps she will kindly remember that at this time I had no outer life at all. Whatever bore to me the look of existence was within me. All my days the tendency had been to an undue predominance of thought over action, and now that the springs of action were for a time dried up, what wonder was it if thought, lording it alone, should assume a reality beyond its right? Hence the life of the day was prolonged into the night; nor was there other than a small difference in their conditions, beyond the fact that the contrast of outer things was removed in sleep; whence the shapes which the waking thought had assumed had space and opportunity, as it were, to thicken before the mental eye until they became dreams and visions.
But concerning what I am about to relate I shall offer no theory. Such mere operation of my own thoughts may be sufficient to account for it: I would only ask—does any one know what the mere operation of his own thoughts signifies? I cannot isolate myself, especially in those moments when the individual will is less awake, from the ocean of life and thought which not only surrounds me, but on which I am in a sense one of the floating bubbles.
I was asleep, but I thought I lay awake in bed—in the room where I still slept—that which had been my grannie’s.—It was dark midnight, and the wind was howling about the gable and in the chimneys. The door opened, and some one entered. By the lamp she carried I knew my great-grandmother,—just as she looked in life, only that now she walked upright and with ease. That I was dreaming is plain from the fact that I felt no surprise at seeing her.
‘Wilfrid, come with me,’ she said, approaching the bedside. ‘Rise.’
I obeyed like a child.