Within his eyes are hung lamps of the sanctuary:
A wind, from whence none knows, can set in sway
And spill their light by fits; but yet their ray
Returns, deep-boled, to its obscurity.
The world as from a dullard turns annoyed
To stir the days with show or deeds or voices;
But if one spies him justly one rejoices,
With silence that the careful lips avoid.
He is a plan, a work of some strange passion
Life has conceived apart from Time’s harsh drill,
A thing it hides and cherishes to fashion
At odd bright moments to its secret will:
Holy and foolish, ever set apart,
He waits the leisure of his god’s free heart.
Consciously or not, the poem is a portrait. More than one touch is recognizable, and there can be no doubt that the opening lines give a glimpse of Edith. They suggest for this reason that the sonnet was written by Katharine; and if that is so, her use of the word dullard sweetly turns the edge of the complaint of critical friends that Katharine could be thoroughly stupid. Of course she could!—;why not? though, to be sure, it was very provoking of her. Returning, however, to the resemblance to Edith. She had never the good health of Katharine, and her beauty, which was of the large, regular, blonde type, suffered in consequence. One of her friends says: “She was as if touched by a cloud—;crystalline and fragile as flowers that love the shade.” All who knew her speak of the extraordinary look of vision in her eyes: time after time one hears of the ‘inspiration’ in her face, which is visible in no matter how poor a photograph or hasty a sketch. Katharine had intensity of another kind: warm, rich, glowing, a lyric and almost bacchic expression. But in Edith there was “a Tuscan quality of refinement, the outward expression of an inward beauty of thought.”
One cannot but associate those “lamps of the sanctuary” with the psychic power which Edith undoubtedly possessed. An incident attested by their cousin, Professor F. Brooks, may be given to illustrate this. It was occasioned by the death of Edith’s father in the Alps. He and his younger daughter Amy were there on holiday in 1897, and had planned to climb the Riffelalp. They wrote of their plan to Katharine and Edith, who received the letter at home in England on the day that the ascent was being made. Edith read the letter and passed it to Katharine with the remark: “If they go to the Riffelalp they will go to their doom.” And, probably about the time she was speaking, Mr Cooper met his death, for he was lost in the ascent, and his body was not recovered for many months.
That is only one of several psychic experiences which incontestably occurred to Edith Cooper, the most impressive being the vision which appeared to her as her mother was dying. Edith, who was helping to nurse her mother, had gone into another room to rest, as it was not believed that the end was near. She afterward told her friend Miss Helen Sturge that in the moment of death her mother’s spirit passed through the room and lingered for an instant beside the bed on which Edith was lying. The event is recorded explicitly in a poem published in Underneath the Bough (first edition):
When thou to death, fond one, wouldst fain be starting,
I did not pray
That thou shouldst stay;
Alone I lay
And dreamed and wept and watched thee on thy way.
But now thou dost return, yea, after parting,
And me embrace,
Our souls enlace;
Ask thou no grace;
Thou shalt be aye confinèd to this place.
Alone, alone I lie. Ah! bitter smarting!
Thou to the last
Didst cling, kiss fast,
Yet art thou past
Beyond me, in the hollow of a blast.