PART IV.

H E ceased; the silence weighed upon each heart,
As an oppression it would flee in vain.
We felt the hopelessness of him who said
" There is no God;" who owned Power infinite,
Yet ruling consciousness denied; who taught
Knowledge-crowned man held no pre-eminence
O'er brutes, though godlike, knowing good and ill;
Who vice and virtue, faith and hope, gainsaid,
Yet lived unstained and truthful; who accused
The moral dignity of man, nor mocked
Brethren he owned and reverenced; who stood
Apart, yet a pervading blessing lived,
Shedding around his influence benign.

We gazed as on a thing unnatural,
Attracted and repelled, on him who lived
In isolation of sublimity
From selfishness, or human or divine
He stood there like a granite monument
To impresses impassive, faith and love
Cast weed-like from him, withering at its base;
Who, with the wisdom of all time replete,
Looked tranquilly to his grave, to pass to worms,
And everlasting darkness.
None replied;
Beside the brook he watched the lapsing stream
Whose lowest note was audible; his brow
And cheek were colourless; the Pastor's voice
Startled the silence:
" Sir, to you alike
We owe our tribute for confessions made,
The impotence revealing of the mind,
The weeds we cling to, save by faith upheld,
And consciousness of an indwelling God,
Deeper than reason cherished in our souls.
But our confessional another lacks,
Ere we compare humanities. We turn
To a mind wilfully degraded, soiled
In mire of disesteem, whose root is pride;
Enthusiasm maddened into hate.
The devious path, through yonder copse-wood wound,
Guides to the moor where dwells the Fanatic."

We followed onward where the flashing brook
Plunged between shouldering mountains, when behold
A marvel! — rising on the desolate heath,
The Wise-Man's wood, oak forest, nature's sons
Shorn of their stature as by lightnings rent.
Grey trunks, in serried phalanx, trenched within
The granite soil, their massive arms entwined,
And gnarled limbs grappling with each, in folds
Inexplicable; whose moss-shielded boughs
Nor sun nor tempest pierced, nor fires from heaven.

" Tread silently; — a Spirit dwells within,
Hallowing the precincts men have holy made!
Sacred this grove to us, by axe unfelled;
Here rallying Freedom taught her sons to feel
The freeman's right, to conquer or to die.
Valour was nurtured here, to which the Dane
And Roman quailed; and here, from granite fanes,
The bearded Druid raised his arm, and told
The revelation of the Godhead found;
The faith and conscious immortality."

While spake the Pastor, we had gained the ascent;
The unfolding landscape opened from beneath.
Green fields and trees were there, and white cots peered
Through mantling foliage; there the church-spire gleamed,
And hamlets brown closed round it like the brows
Of age around the altar of their hope.

We reached the Tor that overbrowed the vale;
A black cave sunk in rocks before us yawned.
Grey fragments, hurled from thunder-splitten peaks,
Lay wildly round the entrance, in whose depths
Darkness was buried; a beech-tree beside
Stood withered, stricken in its opening spring,
Like some fine nature blighted by the world.
No grass-blade spake of life or season's change;
Nought lived or died upon that herbless stone;
No visible movement marked the course of time;
Save the approaching and departing light,
The lessening or lengthened shadows cast,
On dial-plates of everlasting rock:
The heavens in their majestic march moved on,
Eternal motion o'er eternal rest.

We dwelt upon the scene; the Pastor spoke: —
" Here dwells the Fanatic, or rather hides
To brood o'er passions magnified in gloom.
Books controversial are heaped within,
The bible crowning. I have seen him sit
Declaiming with high voice to the deaf air,
Matter as unsubstantial and vain
There was a fiery energy in his phrase,
That awed while it convinced not; gusts that swerved
His helmless reason, that had failed to move
An earthlier judge, far less aspire to heights
Where the soul soars from human passion freed.
All feared, or pitied, and the maniac shunned;
But there was reason with his madness joined.
His words were as barbed arrows, carelessly
Aimed as in sport, whose poison yet was felt
In humbler bosoms, when by him forgot.
His eloquence like inspiration seemed,
When from the gloom of the black rock behind
His face gleamed pale as lightning seen from far.

" The Spirit of Nature and the manifest love
Written upon her everlasting face,
Ne'er touched his heart; in vain the flowers revealed
Meek revelations; they were trodden on,
Unmarked by him, they moved him not; their tale
Of transitory being was unfelt.
He saw not in their speaking faces told
Their silent intercourse with sun and shower,
The joys and sorrows of the living soul.
Voices of woods and waters gave to him
Expression none; he heard them not: the sun
Shone not upon his inner life, or showed
Symbol or shadow of Almighty love
And when the spiritual stars looked out,
Or Moon with vestal face, he only sighed,
Feeling how distant was the rolling shore
That stayed him preaching his wild doctrines there
Perchance he is within; approach, nor fear;
His fondest wish to glorify himself
Before you."
We confronted now the cave,
A moment we beheld him unperceived
A granite fragment rose beside him, spread
Thereon a bible, one hand pressed the leaves.
He sate upon the ground; his head reclined
Upon his arm; his keen eyes, upward raised,
Shot forth electric light. His hectic cheek,
Hollow and flushed, of self-denial told.
Danger stood near him, as with flashing face
He turned to us: —

" Brands from the burning snatched!
I looked for ye to witness from my cave,
The sins of yonder carnal Ninevites;
I judge them not, just God! nor do condemn,
Nor glorify myself. I know my kin
To the great Serpent, yet am I allied,
Lord, to thy greater being; thus am I
Vanquished in thee, to thy will yielding mine.
I know that thou dost look on me apart,
I feel thy dove-like spirit enter me;
That nightly I am folded to thy breast,
Even as Abraham.
" Discerning God!
Hath not the reptile merited from thee?
Won thy great crown of promise, vanquishing
Satan, thy foe, with life's frail weapons given? —
Yea, glorious Lord, I made Thee all in all;
I offered thee the firstlings of my heart,
And if I turned from thy pure altar, lured
By the proud devil, thou didst lead me back;
My pride, dared worms to glorify themselves,
That I still knelt to thee while sinners slept.
I prayed not that thy cup might pass from me;
Drained to its dregs I gloried in the draught:
Even so, Omnipotent! thou honour'st me.

" On my watch-tower like Habakkuk I stood;
Winds roared along the vale, floods burst their bounds
And mingled with the night-storm; red lights flashed
From hurrying elements; half-rent up oaks
Screamed, as they clung convulsively to earth,
That shook to her foundations; then, through clouds
Rolled, scroll-like, back, I saw the fiery face
Of the destroying Angel! In his hand
He held the Book of Life; he turned its leaves
Of lightnings, marking on its writhen page
The world's annihilation.
" Oh, let me
Witness the doom; take thou this reptile life,
Crushed worm-like, Lord, beneath thy chariot wheels,
As thou rid'st on to judgment — let me be
Trampled in mire of my unworthiness,
But let me see the lions of thy wrath
Let loose on them. Let me behold thy strokes;
All the wreaked hate and fiery revenge
Of thy Almighty nature. Be their grave
Sleepless, the undying worm felt in their hearts,
The flames unquenchable, the thirst unslaked!
Let me, in clay or spirit, as thou wilt,
But live to know they feel thee, I am blest;
Their agonies shall reconcile this soul.
But tongues nor harps of angels shall express
My greatness of reward when they shall see
The crown thou placest on my head above;
The acclamations of thy saints heard o'er,
As they lie groaning in their nether hell;
Nor heaven, nor paradise, nor even Thou,
O most munificent God, could'st give me more."

Prostrate he threw himself upon the stones;
Buried his hands within his matted hair:
Passion's convulsive throes his breast upheaved;
Humiliation of blind slavery,
Blended with blinder pride, hypocrisy
With earthlier passion joined.
We left the cave,
Moved by one impulse, silent our descent;
We paused amid a circle of grey stones;
The Fatalist sate, and with an earnest mien
Addressed the Pastor:

" Venerable sir!
Wisdom demeans her office, judgment stoops,
Contemplating that self-degraded man.
Yet once was his enthusiasm thine,
My gentle friend! ere maddened into hate;
So ripens vice from virtue overwrought:
Even in that nook obscure, he sighs for fame,
The breath of popular rumour, to be known;
Dependent on the tongues of those he scorns;
And thus, with saner minds unruled, we are
False to ourselves, and nature; we dare not,
And cannot grasp the truth, the shadow, seen
But by the eyes of our humility
It is our impotence that crushes us,
Even the frailty wherein we boast,
Strutting 'mid solemn follies to our graves.

" We shape and worship shadows, kingly phantoms
Crowned by our hope, for man must hope or fear
Abstraction soars for moments into realms
Of thought, awhile ethereal, but again
To feel her waxen pinions and to sink.
Our life ordained is given us to fulfil
The law of obligation; and we are
Subjected to the reason, that o'errules
The stars in their forewritten course. We live
Until the weight of life oppresses us;
Then fold our hands in sleep, nor feel that death
Was our life's shadow."

" O, my friend!" replied
The Pastor, " you have spoken eloquence,
Yet truth is one, the same; we feel the sun
A blessing, while we question of his light.
The olden seers have blended with your thought,
Who saw the Deity through nature's veils
Confess the truths they mournfully revealed;
What found they, wandering through the infinite,
The ark of faith forsaken? They taught not
The great humility they never knew,
And child-like love, and faith, within us found.
Where dwells the good of their aspiring quest?
They sought but human happiness; was it won
By thought whose name is sadness, wasting life?
Virtue, the moral beautiful and true,
Flowered at their feet unheeded. You found not,
Enthusiast-friend! repose from Nature's shrine,
Priest by herself ordained; that its abode
Was not in dwellings of conventional life
You stood among the crowd companionless,
A spirit conscious of your fall; your tale
Ended in sighs and a suppressed regret,
Closed with desire for material rest,
Rather than faith in an immortal life
To prove your disciplined frailty.
" You, friend!
Are of another sphere, a frame of bronze,
The hardier scion of a sterner growth.
The finer sympathies you overruled.
Latent divinities folded up in man,
His inner wonderment, relations claimed
With higher spheres, to you were but as dreams;
You saw in him the crowning link of life.
The imaginative power that spans the earth
To you was visionary. You beheld
Life, resurrectionless, nailed to its cross;
You weighed the inequalities of ill,
The suffering and endurance closed in death.

" The majesty of Nature's theatre,
Her pillared strength and harmonies, to you
Were as material shows. Your eyes grew on
The scene; the man and part forewritten played.
Our faiths and human aspirations were
To you but proofs of an imperfect life;
Your being was resignment passionless
Closed in the grave of everlasting rest.

" Rise to serener vision, contemplate
A loftier existence; love is ours,
And veneration for all holy things,
From the diviner life in us inspired.
Spirits of hope and faith within us dwell,
Our natures strengthening; nor shall we strive
To unknit the Gordian knot of human ills,
Nor weigh our raptures with our agonies,
Nor heed the curse of impotent despair;
Discords that throb from the bared heart of life,
Raising their voices, ocean-like, from earth,
To the profound of heaven. Virtue is strength,
And life its action; war with powers without,
And strife within. You sought in dreams abstract,
The happiness whose cradle is in faith,
The joy whose face looks out from common things,
And from that inner and diviner sense
That harmonises human hearts to good,
With touches finer than the morning rays
That woke grey Memnon's statue into sound.

" In the soul dwells a feeling of the God,
Anterior to knowledge, that is tongued
By oracles of the dumb universe;
Its shadow thrown from the sun's altar-place,
And on this nether earth in the one type
Whose crowning form and flowering is man,
Bound to this life, lest his soul, winged by faith,
Should flee away, too deeply feeling here
Its immortality. These faculties
In you are dead, and you could not renew.
Indifference like a chill creeps o'er the heart,
The moral strength relaxing, till expires
Its effort, the original nature lost;
And thus a creature of imperfect growth
Parts from this mortal stage, before the face
Of God and nature, his great part unplayed.

" Not Virtue's name resolve into a shade,
Or conscience; if creations of the mind,
They self-existent are, and rule the world;
Fount of all good that make us what we are;
Indelibly stamped within, even as our faith
In the Eternal, or our innate love
Towards humanity, one feeling all."