Oh, flame that burns where fires of home are lit! and oh, flame that burns in the heart to whom life has not said, Awake! and oh, flame that smoulders from death to life, and from life to death, in the dumb lives of those to whom the primrose way is closed! Everywhere the burning of the burning, the flame of the flame, pain and the shadow of pain, joy and the rapt breath of joy, flame of the flame that, burning, destroyeth not, till the flame is no more!...
It is said of an ancient poet of the Druid days that he had the power to see the lines of the living, and these as though they were phantoms, separate from the body. Was there not a young king of Albainn who, in a perilous hour, discovered the secret of old time, and knew how a life may be hidden away from the body so that none may know of it, save the wind that whispers all things, and the tides of day and night that bear all things upon their dark flood?...
The fragrance of the forest intoxicated him. Spring was come indeed. The wild storm had ruined nothing, for at its fiercest it had swept overhead. Everywhere the green fire of Spring would be litten anew. A green flame would pass from meadow to hedgerow, from hedgerow to the tangled thickets of bramble and dog-rose, from the underwoods to the inmost forest glades.
Everywhere song would be to the birds, everywhere young life would pulse, everywhere the rhythm of a new rapture would run rejoicing. The Miracle of Spring would be accomplished in the sight of all men, of all birds and beasts, of all green life. Each, in its kind would have a swifter throb in the red blood of the vivid sap....
She was his Magic. The light of their love was upon everything. Deeply as he loved beauty he had learned to love it far more keenly and understandingly because of her. He saw now through the accidental and everywhere discerned the Eternal Beauty, the echoes of whose wandering are in every heart and brain though few discern the white vision or hear the haunting voice.... Thus it was she had for him this immutable attraction which a few women have for a few men; an appeal, a charm, that atmosphere of romance, that air of ideal beauty, wherein lies the secret of all passionate art.
The world without wonder, the world without mystery! That indeed is the rainbow without colours, the sunrise without living gold, the noon void of light....
In deep love there is no height nor depth between two hearts, no height nor depth nor length nor breadth. There is simply love. What if both at times were wrought too deeply by this beautiful dream? What if the inner life triumphed now and then, and each forgot the deepest instinct of life that here the body is overlord, and the soul but a divine consort?
There are three races of man. There is the myriad race which loses all through (not bestiality, for the brute world is clean and sane) perverted animalism; and there is the myriad race which denounces humanity, and pins all its faith and joy to a life the very conditions of whose existence are incompatible with the law to which we are subject—the sole law, the law of nature.
Then there is that small untoward clan, which knows the divine call of the spirit through the brain, and the secret whisper of the soul in the heart, and for ever perceives the veils of mystery and the rainbows of hope upon our human horizons, which hears and sees, and yet turns wisely, meanwhile, to the life of the green earth, of which we are part, to the common kindred of living things with which we are at one—is content, in a word, to live because of the dream that makes living so mysteriously sweet and poignant; and to dream because of the commanding immediacy of life....
What are dreams but the dust of wayfaring thoughts? Or whence are they, and what air is upon their shadowy wings? Do they come out of the twilight of man's mind: are they ghosts of exiles from vanished palaces of the brain: or are they heralds with proclamations of hidden tidings for the soul that dreams?