I . OF CALIF. LIBRARY. LOS ANGECE5 THE MEASURE OF LIFE THE MEASURE OF LIFE BY FRANCES CAMPBELL AUTHOR OF "TWO QUEENSLAXDERS," "A PILLAR OF DUST" NEW YORK E. P. BUTTON & CO. 31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET TO LADY ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL I OFFER THESE SPIRITUAL ADVENTURES, THE- BEST OF WHICH WERE INSPIRED BY HER, OUT OF A KNOWLEDGE GREATER THAN MY OWN 2125792 CONTENTS PAGE THE SCARECROW i A SARONG OF TRENGGAM 8 THE LOCK OF THE LITTLE SOULS . . . ..15 GLASTONBURY THORN 24 IN THE HOUSE OF OUR LADY OF PITY ... 30 PALINGENESIS 37 THE SHIP OF HEAVEN 45 " FOR AS THE SOUL DOTH RULE " 57 THE WATERS OF TIR-NA-OGE 64 THE HEIGHT OF THE STARS 73 BORROWED DAYS AND STRAYED 82 THE SUNLIGHT OF THE SEA 90 SILHOUETTES 98 THE GOLDEN RULE 105 THE HOUR OF SILENCE 113 HELL-SHOON 120 BLOWN FROM THE INFINITE 128 SONGS IN THE RAIN 137 THE Music OF THE WILD 145 vii Contents PAGE PEARLS AND GREY DAYS 152 GRAN-FINN 157 THE MYSTERY OF FIRE 164 THE Music OF THE MOON 172 THE TURF-CUTTER 178 WIND AND THE SILENCE 190 FEOGHDAWN 199 CRUX MYSTICA 206 IN THE DAWN OF TIME 215 THE CHURCH OF THE FOUR WINDS . . . .224 THE QUEST OF LORNACH OF BANBA . . . .235 THE FIELD OF THE GOLDEN FLOWERS . . .242 LlBAN OF THE WAVE 351 SAMHAIN 259 Vlll THE MEASURE OF LIFE THE SCARECROW TT THEN I open my window in the morning, I look out on the snow of spring, the scattered bloom lying heavily on the apple boughs, faintly pink ; the pear and plum and cherry, peach and nectarine, against the red-brick wall, pressed flatly crimson along its length. On the top of the wall brown and yellow wall- flowers bloom, flinging their sweet odours on the whistling gales. The oak is covered over with bronze, the chestnut casting off all its brown satin coverings and putting out little spires of tightly folded green, tipped with invisible coral. The cedar tree spreads a romantic shadow, darkly violet on the grass ; the pine rushes up over the margin of the river, between its level spreads of vivid green ; and a walnut tree, gauntly bare, stands between me and the feathery greenness, light and airy, of the willows along its verge. All along that wide stretch of ground I can see I B The Measure of Life the cloud-shadows chase the sunshine over the purple- brown of the furrowed fields. The sun shines on it gaily ; the storms come up and burst across it, the low clouds trailing in vapoury grey on the serried lines of faint vegetation. One long space, running parallel with the hedge, is completely bare of green- ness, and over it wavered from time to time a small, grotesque figure, impossible to distinguish from such distance. And ever and anon, through rain and shine, came a burst of childish song, clear and shrill just two lines of an old familiar tune. I think I have heard it all my life. It is the very first of all my recollec- tions, sitting by the fire in an old Irish house and listening to its mystic note. I have heard it in France in a convent garden, on an atoll in the Pacific, in a hut in the jungle in Java. It is the oldest melody in the world, and belongs to a time when the world was young. It is a wild music full of mysterious suggestion. It makes me think of an air that strikes hotly on the cheek, the sound of flutes played softly, and the fragrance of tuberoses. Odd to hear it wafted on the freezing wind of early spring, across the pear and apple blossom, within sound of London town ! Yesterday the sun shone warmly all day long ; last night it snowed. This morning the wind blew The Scarecrow from the north-east, bitterly cold, from a blue sky all frilled with great indigo-coloured clouds, bursting with icy rain. I saw the clouds sail along the furrows, sweeping over the horizon, scattering the nesting birds before them like withered leaves, driving past my windows in a tempestuous downfall, chill as ice. And through it all came the little song just two lines again and again. I went out and sought the singer. I found him on the patch of bare ground which had been but newly sown a tiny lad in a tattered coat down to his bare heels, an old straw hat pulled over his scarlet ears, and a ragged handkerchief tied to a long stick in one purple hand. But his eyes, wide and bright, were happy enough, though his face was almost blue, his lips blanched to whiteness with the bitter cold. He stopped in his walk between the furrows every now and again to dance in the wet soil and sing his little song " Fly away, little burds, till the blade springs full, The sun is shinin' wonnerfool ! "_ He put his hands to his mouth at the end and made such an outcry that all the birds in Christendom must e'en have taken flight had they heard it. I looked over the hedge and saw the heap of ashes 3 The Measure of Life where the hedger had made his fire, saw my way, climbed across, and stood beside the Scarecrow. He was such a small, pathetically cheerful Scare- crow that my heart went out to him at once. " You be trespassin 1 ," he assured me joyfully. I said I did not mind if he did not, whereat he laughed, and sang his little song once more. I asked him why he chose such weather to rival my friend the blackbird. He gripped at the wet soil with his purple toes, and sang again, dancing merrily. "They dratted sparrers don't be mindin' the weather much," he remarked. He bellowed loudly, and certain adventu- rous sparrows fluttered wildly past us on the gale. And with them came down the rain, blotting out the long furrows, and surrounding us with the fragrance of daffodils, sweetest of pure chill scents. The very breath of spring. Brentford is always full of the breath of daffodils in the early months. One cannot see them, but can always divine their presence near. They are there in crowds fields of them, acres of them ; daffodils in orchards, in back yards, in old walled gardens, rising like last year's sunshine returned with the perfume of last year's lost happiness. The rain shut me in with the little Scarecrow. It beat in our faces and ran in torrents from our 4 The Scarecrow hair. It made little pools round our feet, and pelted in our ears. Cold, cold rain. " Oh ! " cried the Scarecrow, sorrowfully, " you do be gettin' wet ! Stan' behin' me, an' I'll keep some off. 1 ' I followed him down the flooded furrow, stood while he danced, and went on while he sang. Said I " How can you go on singing that when the sun is nowhere visible ? " "But he shone yestidy," retorted the Scarecrow, with a merry eye. " An' like enough he'll be shinin termorrer " " Pray," I inquired, " is this a paying occupation ? How much a week ? " " Eighteenpence," said the Scarecrow, happily. " Lot o' money, ain't it ? " "Riches!" I agreed enthusiastically. "Tell me, what would you do if somebody gave you fifty times that much ? " He pondered on this, after his song and dance, while the rain descended and beat on us both. " There ain't that much money in Brentford," he said, with a regretful eye. I sought in my wet pocket and found half a crown, with which I immediately presented him. He bit it carefully, keeping an eye on me the while, and waving the ragged flag lest the sparrows should take advantage of his preoccupation. 5 The Measure of Life " What's it for ? " he demanded sturdily. " Keeping the rain off," I assured him. He pondered over that, and thought it would serve. " I kep' a good deal off," he considered thought- fully. He disposed of the coin in some mysterious re- ceptacle in his tattered garment, while the wind wound its long tails about his bare legs, and he sang lustily. "What will you do with it ? " I questioned. 1 " How much tea an' terbaccer can yer get for this much money ? " he asked, touching himself eagerly. I told him what I thought, and he beamed like a disguised Cupid, slapping his wet sides joyfully. "Anything for yourself?" I went on. "What would you like best ? " " I like a big rattle," he responded instantly, " to fright them dratted sparrers ! " And he bellowed at them again like a bull of Bashan. " Hadn't you better go home ? " he suggested ; " you're pretty wet, you know." I ploughed my way back to the hedge, found the narrow fence joining it to the bridge, and got over on the towpath. There a thought struck me, and I called back, " Who is the tea for and the tobacco ? " 6 The Scarecrow " Granma," he shouted, " an* Granfer they both be bad with rheumatiz." " Good-bye, Scarecrow ! " I returned. He danced in the splashing furrows. "You're not so bad yerself," he bawled on the screeching gale. "WT all that 'air flying loose they will kid you goin' back." "Come with me," I entreated, "and keep them off;" but he went down the furrows dancing and singing as if there were no such things as cold and rain in the world " Fly away, little burds, till the blade be full, The sun is shinin' wonnerfool ! " And all at once the sun shone out, golden and triumphant ; the river ran like glass. The thickset hedge was dusky coral hung with scintillating gems. The old tower stood up against a sky of deepest ultramarine. All the trees were covered with a veil of palest shimmering green. The far-off heights came near pure lapis lazuli. All the songbirds shouted melodiously, and off the gleaming furrows came the familiar refrain. Oh yes ! he was wonder- ful even for a scarecrow; and I am sure that so long as he lives, and where'er he may be, the sun will shine wonderfully in his heart. A SARONG OF TRENGGAM ^TT^HE bungor tree quivered in the sunlight, its * leaves a tremulous play of pale-green light, its blossoms clustering fires of deep purple, the branches flames of pale silver, and its smooth trunk a pillar of white heat. It stood above the red-walled river where the water rushed, a mirror of glass silent, fierce, irre- sistible beneath the arch of the low bridge, and vanished in the forest Above, the sky reached high and infinitely blue. Afar on each side lay the forest, motionless in the noontide heat, all greenish-grey, with here a blaze of pure scarlet, and there a mist of mauve. All silent, motionless, remote no faintest susurration, no whisper from wandering winds. It was as if I sat in a world uninhabited but for me. And with the silence I was conscious of a something that only comes near the soul when it is utterly alone. The sweet, haunting fragrance of the bungor- flowers floated out on the air like incense burning at a hidden high altar in the mighty aisles of a vast cathedral. A strange thought came to me that if 8 A Sarong of Trenggam I could find that altar, the boon I so craved might not be denied. I looked from the hastening waters of the river, and saw beside me in the shadow of the bungor tree one whom I had known in days gone by. Then he had been a great and powerful prince ; now he was a mendicant priest. He had made the Great Renunciation. Had left his palaces, his riches, his pleasure, luxuries, and kin, so that none of these might come between him and his preparation for the Hereafter. His goings and comings no man might know. Like the wind, he was there ; like the wind, he was gone. His was a more than mortal power, for he could read the unspoken thought, and because of his sufferings nothing was hidden from him that was good to know. He sat silent, regarding me with strange, bright eyes. His patched, yellow robe hung faded and thin around him, his emaciated hands clasped on his staff, his thick hair flowing around his thin face. He answered my heart. " No man," he said slowly, " may have to-day's feast and to-morrow's song." " But why not ? " I asked, my eyes returning to the fleeting mirror of black glass between its confining walls of red. "If he live to-day and wakes to-morrow?" 9 The Measure of Life "It is ordained," answered the priest, "that he who feasts at sunset shall not sing at dawn. With this instant we buy the next For everything a price. It is the Law." " For beauty and wealth, O Holy One ! " said I, "there is no law, nor doth he who thinks with the Persian regard it. What if he say : " ' One thing is certain, and the rest is Lies The flower that once has blown for ever dies.' What then?" "Beauty and wealth," pronounced the deep, un- impassioned voice from beneath the shade, " are but honey on the edge of a knife when the sweetness is gone from the flesh, the knife bites deep through bone and sinew, piercing the soul ; what availeth jewelled hair or painted eyes, the clash of the cymbal or scented garments, if the soul is bleeding within and naught can stay its agony ? I know the Persian. What if, like wind along the waste, he gathers wisdom till he teach again with more knowledge ? None but the fool is utterly accursed." " Holy One, who is the Fool ? " "He who takes the moment as by right and calleth it his own, destroying the thing that prevents his gratification, or that, perhaps, which ministers to it ; he who is without thought or care or compassion, whose sole desire is himself, into whose heart the 10 A Sarong of Trenggam Eternal looks and sees it full, with no room for aught beyond self ; that man is the fool be he beggar by the wayside or the king upon his throne." " Is the fool to blame because he is a fool ? " The silence came near and listened for his reply ; I had a thought that the river was grasped tight within my two hands ; and for all my strength it flowed the same swift, terrible, and strong away from me to the impalpable shadow of the infinite. When I lifted my eyes again I saw the priest sat holding out a wonderful sarong of fine stuff. In it were blended all marvellous primal colours and half- tints : the amethyst of the mountains at evening, the rapturous vermilion of the dawn, the sheeny green of the paddy-fields at noon, the red of the ruby and the darker flame of living blood, lavender grey, the blue of the sky, the green of the sea where it shoals over coral, and the deeper sapphire where it sinks to depths unknown. Crossed with gold, shot with silver ; the sarong gleamed and shone in the flickering sun- light from between the roof of leaves. I took the cloth, speechless with wonder, and laid it, a flame of woven splendour, across my knees. I forgot the speeding river, the purple glooms of forest and the fate of the accursed, to gaze upon its sparkle and brightness, when suddenly it lay changed, a fine cloud of wavering grey flat and monotonous II The Measure of Life with incoherent design and broken weft, knotted warp, and marred edge. "Holy One!" I cried in dismay, "what is this thing ? Is this the Cloth of Dreams ? " "Not so, Beloved!" he protested, with bright, shadowless eyes on mine. "But the web of a life- Nor is the brightness gone. It only waits the light. Give it to me." He took the sarong back, and held it up, glowing, and shining in the sun. " Hearken now," he said : "to each one of us is given at the beginning no more than the grey yarn and the loom. Therewith must we weave a garment to clothe ourselves. After and the garment is Life what we make will determine our state when it is done. The king cannot sit down with the sweeper. Yet kings may weave garments that will fit them only for the sweeper's caste, and the sweeper will be clothed like the sun. For see, we must weave our sarong from what others give us on the highway where we ply our loom. Mark well, we have only the grey yarn, the fibre of the beaten flax, and that is not sufficient for a festal garment. Therefore, with great pangs we seek the wherewithal to make it beautiful. Some will give us the Opal of Blessing or the Ruby of Love. And whatever we gain is always in exchange for what we have first given. It is the Law. Fire of sacrifice, reds that are 12 A Sarong of Trenggam suffering, abnegation, self-conquest, holy aspirations, repentances, charities most of all, love and charity the charity that costs much to the giver. Each traveller along the way leaves a something worthy to be woven in the design if the gift, the gift bestowed upon him, is sufficiently of value. And it matters not if he know its worth and cherish it greatly, or if he fling it in the dust to perish beneath careless feet. The substance left you will be the same ; for what you give determines what will be given in return. All is woven in the loom, the shuttle flies till Death comes by, cuts the warp and severs the weft and the Soul goes forth wearing the garment. This." He held the long cloth up in his lean, brown hands, flashing like a fabric of strange jewels in the fugitive sunlight, the gorgeous colouring picked out a design marvellous in its clean simplicity. " This was woven in a Trenggama loom ; the weaver was a potter and a king." " Like you, had he made the Great Renunciation?" " Nay, for he was a potter from the beginning ; see what this garment of his has become. Yet, like you and me and the Fool of whom we spake, he had in the beginning no more than a handful of grey flax." "Can one weave such garment for another withal?" " It is the Law that no one can weave for another, 13 The Measure of Life but always for himself. There is no time for more ; wise man or fool, we are allowed but so long for the making of that which will clothe our souls." Once more my eyes were fastened as by a spell on the swift river within its red walls. Suddenly its surface ruffled in a puff of noonday wind. The bungor tree showered down on me a rain of scented blossoms. All the forest moved and came closer, calling in soft whispers from cool and ferny depths and I knew I was alone. THE LOCK OF THE LITTLE SOULS r * was a little crowd on the narrow strip of shelving grass by the old mill. A man was thrusting a long pole at haphazard into the water ; a woman with a baby in her arms stood in the middle of the narrow plank bridge and looked down where the glassy blackness of the mill-race broke over the crazy old wheel in a turbulent, bluish foam. Old Mary Fitzgerald was sitting on the tiller of a disabled barge moored to the mill-quay. Her eyes brooded, dark with dream, on the darkness of the Brent the still blackness that looks still because of the incredible swiftness of its motion. She never glanced aside at the tumbling walls of the mill, with its mossy bridge, its lichen-grown, red-tiled roof, the ferns and ivy clinging to its shattered windows. Her gaze was on the Brent, that leaps here like some sullen, black-browed woman touched with a sudden frenzy of passion to the arms of her lover, and is lost, after that transient rapture, in dull, drab, monotonous despair, morosely gliding to the larger, deeper stream, to be merged and lost. 15 The Measure of Life She lifted her large grey eyes from the rushing water to look into my face. " What is it, Mary ? " I asked in the Irish ; for Mary came, in her old age, to keep her son's children in this place, and has but little English, so she is glad to hear the Erse in this foreign land. "It is little Owen Budh," she said softly; "he went out to play. You will be lookin' for him, achree ? " * I will be looking for him," I assured her. " Yes ; I will bring him back." " Ah, no ! " she murmured, her eyes returning to the glassy water. "You will not be bringin' him back, Murgien Cr6n, though he had the great love for you." She was silent at that, and when I spoke again she did not hear. So I left her, remembering that old Mary had times of dream when no one came nigh her. Slow, silent, black, smooth as a mirror, the Brent flowed between the towpath and the low meadows, reflecting in its mid-stream the high blueness of the spring day, driven across by fleecy clouds. At the sides the radiant greenness of the spring, each little leaf, each twig and spray. The wind was high, and suddenly cold, suggesting the nearness of snow for all the brilliant sun. It 16 The Lock of the Little Souls sang and puffed and gambolled over buttercups and mayflowers, shaking the bloom off the gnarled hawthorns, the petals off the apple and pear. May had lent March a day, and March had sent her this in exchange ; yet all its wild playfulness never rippled the Brent for more than a moment of time. Out there on the towpath the air brimmed with gaiety; there was an endless roundelay in the tall elms, in which each bird was trying its part. The blackbird in the rapture of his artist soul, surrounded by sun and green leaves, started on a keen high note, whistling it again, again, and again, till the heart cried out at its sweetness. Then he all at once burst into a wonderful melody, exquisite in its cadence, falling in perfect time and tune and measured phrase, with the thrush making a full deep second, and the little stone-chaffbreaking into the pauses of the wind with his "chip, chip, chip," till the whole choir broke into song simultaneously, and he was lost to the ear. A barge came down the Brent, hardly breaking the black water. The old grey horse remembered me, and took the narrowest margin as I thrust myself against the quickset hedge to let him pass, looking at me the while with friendly seriousness out of eyes like amethysts drowned in some deep bog pool. 17 C The Measure of Life His old master grey, too, with time and weather gave me good day, and the wife smiled from beneath her faded sunbonnet, greeting as she went by. They hardly rippled the dark river ; there was no sign when I reached the old lock, deserted now, since the barges go through the canal, that a boat had ever gone through. It is very quiet at the old lock. No one ever comes there. I was alone with the sweet, cold spring day. I sat on the great beam, covered with faded red, with which the huge water-gates are moved. There was a dark, level mirror down below, and into it gushed little waterfalls of palest aquamarine from the crack between the doors. On the left was a row of tall elms swaying and sighing in the wind ; between them were glimpses of the silver and golden starred meadows, bordered with tall reeds and sedges. On the right, the emerald greenness of the springing furrows, the purple greenness of the young beet and the pale chrysoprase of springing corn. Before, the river, level and slow, flowing to the bridges of the ancient city, hidden in its windings. And overhead, the high blue- ness of the sky swept by the rushing wind, singing of the sea ; through it the soaring melody of the choir of Love, phrased by the " chip, chip, chip " of the stone-chaff. " It is a very happy day ! " It was a voice so small and sweet that it seemed the thought within 18 The Lock of the Little Souls me made articulate by wind and bird and swinging bough, the dripping of water on water. " It is a happy, happy day ! " repeated the voice. I glanced aside in that lonely, quiet place, green and removed, wondering who could speak like that. A little child with yellow hair and eyes greenly blue sat on the beam beside me in the sunlight. He was a little child, wearing a tattered, pinkish tunic that seemed familiar to me, but there was a strange light over him which made me wonder. I could not be sure of him, for now he seemed in that greenness to be substance, and now merely shadow. Now I thought him like the grass, now the leaf shapes on the trees, and now the reflections from the river. He made me think of the mayflowers, the reeds and sedges, the sallow twigs, and the iris bending in the breeze. Then he smiled, and I knew him. He was little Owen Budh. " Oh, Owen Budh ! " I cried ; " 'tis glad I am to find you. You must go home with me." He drew up his little bare knees and clasped his hands around them. I thought he blew sidelong in the wind like a yellow-petalled flower. " I will not be goin' back any more to that place," he said, with a laugh in his changing eyes. " I will be stayin' here a long while." "Oh, but," I urged, "your grandmother will be sad for you, Owen Budh ! " 19 The Measure of Life " She will not be sad for me," he laughed. " Tis better here nor at home." " But tell her why," suddenly said another little voice at my elbow ; and I saw before me on the tow- path a slender lad in a quaint dress of changing velvet. A dark little boy, with great brown eyes that smiled in the sun. He held by the hand a tiny baby girl, with curly flaxen hair, who babbled joyfully, swinging herself to and fro. Her long, straight frock was clinging to her little limbs, and her curls lay damply on her baby forehead. Owen Budh's curls were damp too. " If you look over," he whispered, pointing to the black silence below, "you will see that I cannot go home." There was a white glimmering in the dark water far below. I could not see what it was, but I knew suddenly why Owen's curls were wet. " You are not afraid ? " questioned the grave little boy in the velvet dress. I looked at him in the sun, and saw he had on him the emerald and purple of the iris when it blooms in the hot July day. "Why should I be afraid ? " I asked. " Then we can all come," he cried softly ; and his voice was like the echo of the murmuring leaves, as he waved a transparent hand across the lock. 20 The Lock of the Little Souls "This is the lock of the little lost children," he explained to me. " There are many of us." Instantly there was a throng of little children around me, pressing over the narrow bridge, and across the towpath, and on the level grass, peeping from the elms and hawthorn, and among the reeds and flags. " The river took us," went on the grave little boy. " None of us were happy and our homes were dark." A little girl with streaming auburn hair placed a tiny hand on my knee. " We have light now ; we are never hungry ; and we are so happy." " We are all happy ! " cried the soft baby voices. The children came nearer, lifting up and down in the wind, their little garments showing all tints of emerald and aquamarine, the greenness of sapphire, the topaz greenness, the verdure of the turquoise. They smiled at me, touching me with hands that were soft like the kiss of the passing wind, caressing me with cool lips that had no touch in them. " How can you be happy ? " I questioned. The tall girl with the auburn hair swayed her slim body in the sun, and answered me. " We are happy like the trees." " Like the wind and stars," added the dark boy in the velvet dress. 21 The Measure of Life " Like the birds and the clouds," said Owen Budh. " The river and the butterflies," said another. " We are part of them all and their joy." They rose off the level like a flock of butterflies, chrysoprase and golden, and settled on the river above the lock. " Come again and see us," they cried. " Good-bye, Murgien Cno ! " cried Owen Budh ; and his voice was the insistent note of the blackbird I have heard along the river bank. " Good-bye ! " The sound came to me that time like a word on a reed pipe played softly in the wind, when one dreams between dark and twilight. Fiontuin reclined against the rusty windlass, his black eyes laughing at me. "Oh, Weaver of Dream!" cried I, "was this illusion ? Were the children here ? " "The little lost children of the lock?" said he. " They were here, Murgien ; " and his pipe sang as Owen Budh had sung to me at Christmas-time. " They are learning to be happy," he went on to my unspoken thought. " They had but little happi- ness in their dark houses." " But must they stay here for endless years ? " " Years ! " scoffed Fiontuin ; " years are the ropes of sand with which Humanity would bind souls to earth. There are no years. What is Time to Him 22 The Lock of the Little Souls who gives an aeon to the mark on a bird's wing or the colour of a flower ? " " And what can these little lost ones learn ? " " The joy of the blowing wind," said Fiontuin, playing on his little grey-green pipe the while ; " the blossoming flower, the bird's rapture, the happiness of the leaping wave, the drifting cloud, the flowing tide, the peace of all growing, happy, beautiful things. Happiness is the essence of God's self. They must learn before they can go on." " And we who cannot go out so soon ? " I asked. "Must learn in blood and tears in sweat and grime. Beloved, farewell!" Mary Fitzgerald peered up at me from beneath her hood. " An' why will ye be weepin', asthore ?" she asked. "For the little life, so near the Heart of Love ?" And yet I think that Mary wept, even as I did. Though, perhaps, not for little Owen Budh. GLASTONBURY THORN I WANT you to come with me and look out on the night. Not the night of this great city, with its roaring streets, and never-ending procession of haunting faces fleeting by no man knows whither ; not this swelling vortex of human energy and effort no ! but away far on the downs, among the silent forest folk. It is very still there, and there is but little light, for the moon is young, a circle of pale gold, with one- half its circumference pressed into the steely indigo of the winter sky. There is a cold radiance from the glittering stars in Orion's belt, and Hesper hangs very low. The silence may be almost felt, yet the night is young ; but it is December, and bitterly cold for Christmas-time. The trees stand gaunt and leafless, holding out bare, long branches to the sky, all covered by a delicate network of small twigs, intricate and fine as lace. Even in this dim, frosty light the vivid vermilion of their forked tips is the dominating note in the frigid silence. The trees stand motionless in 24 Glastonbury Thorn their long avenues, arraying themselves in misty distances where star and moonlight lose themselves in amethystine depths frozen into immutable calm. All the little wild creatures are huddled in nest or burrow or hollow trunk ; it is freezing hard, and the cold brings a merciful torpor with it to them all. I remember this avenue in the wood in the late summer-time, the path was green as emerald then, and the trees were still resplendent in their sweeping foliage. I followed a ray of sunlight down to this little glade, and saw there an ancient thorn, gnarled and old, with all the summer greenery crying shame on its barrenness. Here, in this small open space, where the bracken is stiff with the sparkle of frost jewels, and the moss shines in the gloom like scattered diamonds here are larch, and fir, and oak, all stark and stripped. But can this white wonder be the thorn ? The moonlight shows forth a miracle ! The thorn is burdened with blossom and leaf, the cold air is sweet with the breath of May. It is unmistakable yet ! Well, how can it be ? What marvel is this that upholds the sweetness and bloom of spring to the icy winter skies ? It is the Glastonbury Thorn, which blossoms for the birthday of our Lord. That is the legend. No need to repeat it here, it is known so well. It may be that the pious monkish scribe who first wrote it down knew in his heart that it had 25 The Measure of Life blossomed thus long years before the Christ-child came, but none the less he showed forth a meaning in its history, that she who runs may yet read plain, for it is the Symbol of the Soul, an epitome of Faith. The skies are bitter, the wind chills to the very marrow ; on every side is blank desolation and death, yet here stands the thorn triumphant, fragrant, lovely beyond all description a thing of wonder, so beautiful that unconsciously the mind is filled with reverence and the heart with worship. It is immortal youth, smiling on the grave of the past. Yet here it stood when Spring walked the earth, and all the wood folk put on their loveliest. The oak had leaves of burnished copper ; the larch hung itself with sweet-smelling crimson tassels ; and the fir piped like a shepherd on the hills in the wandering airs of May. And it was naked and bare amid them all. Spring is the time of flowers, but it had none ; bare in the dim moonlight of December, in the very chill and snow around it, it writes itself a miracle. Let us go ! It begins to work. Memory is awaking at the touch of its pale fragrance bitter-sweet, poignant memory of a vanished spring a summer fled, when the sun shone warm, and the sweet o* the year was still to come. Does the thorn remember that day the first warm, lovely day which came clothed like a bride, in a drifting robe of vapoury 26 Glastonbury Thorn white, hung over the tenderest cobalt, with the sunbeams flashing and playing through ? It had no buds ready to break their brown coverings at a touch ; no green leaves already put forth. It was bare as the oak is now. Unlovely and barren in all the riotous sweetness of the spring. Did it feel its own ugliness and isolation ? Did it fret, think you, against the cruel decree which kept it thus apart, when all nature wore her loveliest robes ? Was there wild rebellion and futile beating against the bars of iron circumstances ? Who can tell ? No one of us can know, but we must feel instinctively that it was so. But if it was, what gladness must fill it now ! Look back ! how beautiful it is amid the ice and snow ! So it is with many a human life, and especially with many women. The springtide of life passes by them with niggardly hand, bestowing nothing, while lavishing much on all around. Every pretty, useless, evanescent thing has its bridal crown of flowers, its vernal wedding garment, while they stand, grim and barren, out of all harmony with their world. They cannot respond to the sunshine, to the gracious showers, or the balmy winds. Spring and summer alike pass them scornfully by. Autumn chills and stings them with the reproach of barrenness. Then comes winter with roaring tempest and bitter tooth. 27 The Measure of Life Crimson leaf and golden fruit are alike beaten down and forgotten. There are wild storms, sleet and snow, nipping frosts, and long, silent nights of darkness. And lo ! when hope seemed dead and youth perished and gone, the miracle : the snow- white, fragrant blossom and leaf, for Christmas Eve. So, too, there are natures in whom the sunshine of wealth and happiness awake no soul-bloom. They are so shut up within themselves, so narrowed into their own interests, that they unconsciously absorb all, and give nothing in return. It may be that the second self that lies dormant within us all protests dumbly against its own incapacity, and it may be the protest is unheard. Then comes the winter of suffering and misfortune. The sap rises, the tiny brown buds jut out, and presently there is the bloom filling the icy winter day with delight. We cannot have it all ways. If youth and middle age are bare of flower, the bloom will most surely come to be a December miracle. Some women's souls develop slowly, and put forth all their fragrance when youth is past. But they need the season of dark and doubt and loneliness before the bloom and beauty can mature. And to them what may, per- haps, seem the affliction of the innocent is but, after all, the necessary development of their dormant fruitfulness. 28 Glastonbury Thorn It is never a wise thing to shirk pain or suffering or loss. Accept them all as the thing needful to perfection, the winter that so beautifies the barren tree. Poverty, sickness, yearning all these make up the storm and frosts and forbidding skies of life. But if we look steadily through them to the eternal sunshine of God's face, our souls will be crowned with blossom like the Glastonbury Thorn. IN THE HOUSE OF OUR LADY OF PITY / HpHE House of Our Lady of Pity stands in one * corner of a silent, old-world square. Once upon a time it was the country mansion of a wild and witty lord, companion in iniquity to a dissolute king, well-nigh as witty, though scarce so wise as himself. It fronts the square boldly, a mellow expanse of time-worn vermilion, overgrown with lichen, moss, and ivy, its tall windows and capacious porch speaking wide welcome to the passer-by, and to those wanderers who come timidly to its ever-open door, broken by the tempest of life, to hide themselves below its red-tiled roof. The mission of the Sisters of Our Lady of Pity is to those unfortunates who seldom repent, because repentance is of so little avail, since the world will neither forget nor condone their offence. When they are utterly broken, when misery has said its last word to them, when Death whispers at their ear, such of them as know, creep to the arms of Our Lady of Pity, and are comforted by the know- ledge that Almighty Love will not look so keenly 30 In the House of our Lady of Pity into the performance as the intention. " He knoweth all things," say the Sisters, and ask no question of the refugees. Within the roomy old mansion all is immaculately clean and pure. The wide, spacious rooms are full of sunshine, and silent, odorous of incense, scented with flowers from the old-fashioned garden. In that garden the Refugees love to work ; perhaps the first and most innocent of all human instincts is the love within us for the garden, of watching the green things spring and bud and blossom into loveliness. The Sisters of Our Lady of Pity are all women gently born, gently bred ; they esteem that old garden as their most powerful persuader back to the paths of peace. In it grow all the quaint, sweet old-world flowers that our ancestors loved for their virtues or their fragrance. Sweet-william and marigolds, goat's-rue, and the white pinks beloved of hapless Anne Boleyn. Roses, York and Lancaster, cabbage and moss roses ; sweet-briar and southernwood, that boys make into posies in my native land for their sweethearts to carry to church ; tall orange and white lilies, and all the others of their sweet company. The Refugees cultivate them all for market, and learn of them the while, and they do many other things, so that they may forget the past in the The Measure of Life making of a future. Among other things they do laundry-work, and it was in the laundry that I first saw wild, passionate, beautiful Perdita. I only had one glimpse of her then, and another afterwards; but these two will make me remember her always, though not one word of her history is known to me nor yet to any other that I know. She was standing in the middle of the laundry floor, with the spring sunshine lighting up a tumbled mass of waving hair, her lined face tense with rage, her black eyes blazing with passion. Under her feet was a trampled pile of fine linen, and facing her, with the scarlet imprint of a slender hand on her white cheek, stood Sister Mary John, sweetest, most patient, most holy of all the Sisters. Sister Mary John has eyes like the grave, questioning eyes of a child ; they make one feel abashed, remembering one's knowledge of the world and things in it, because they seem to ask a question to which there is no answer. Yet of all the Sisters she is most beloved. Perdita returned this questioning, wondering look with rage and defiance for just so long as one might count ten. Then suddenly she flung herself at the Sister's feet and was sobbing wildly, desolately there, as if all repentance were futile and hopeless, the sorrow of one lost. 32 In the House of our Lady of Pity Over her stooped Sister Mary John, and drew her to her feet, with a whispered word. There was a long sigh through the wide, airy room, and she gathered up the crumpled garments, trodden in her fierce rage, and went out with hanging head and downcast eyes. It was in the afternoon, and I had come to Benediction. Benediction in that house is more than ever a sacred mystery it suggests so much more than it reveals. The little church was once the ball-room. The ceiling is still painted with tiny Cupids, blue-winged and pink, that peer over the cloud-edges on the black-robed nuns and their sad following. The five long windows open on the garden, and the organ is in the musicianers' gallery, quaint, high, and dusky, at the extreme end of the long apartment. Sister Mary John plays the organ and trains the choir. The singing is always beautiful, but this after- noon it was wonderful indeed, and such as I have never heard since. The nuns filed silently in, and after them the Refugees : faces darkened with suffering, faces disfigured with vice, with sensual indulgences, pale with desperation, remorse, hopeless longing the flotsam and jetsam off the ocean of life cast into this quiet harbourage. 33 D The Measure of Life High in the carved old gallery Sister Mary John made strange music; a company of nuns on her left, on her right a tall, slender figure, with a thick veil of black baize thrown over her head and face. I knew it was Perdita ; but that veil, for no reason at all, filled me with a vague horror of what was hidden beneath it. The mystery, the remoteness surrounding it, thrilled me curiously. I felt fascinated, yet feared to look. I turned to the altar and tried to forget the mysterious figure by the organ. The old priest came in, with his two little red-tuniced acolytes, one on either hand. The chill wind of spring was singing its song of roaming among the daffodils and narcissi outside, wafting in, between the puffs of lily-scent and incense, whisperings of wild, tempest-riven seas and driving foam. The little altar was ablaze with light and covered with white bloom. The priest paused, his quavering old voice dying abruptly. The organ took up a new theme, and out from behind the black veil came a singing like that of seraphs before the Throne a voice that travelled down unimaginable depths of heartrending entreaty and soared in crystal-clearness to the farthest heights of song. " Rosa Mystica. Ora pro nobis." 34 In the House of our Lady of Pity The nuns in their stalls sang, the little girls clustered between the doors, the nuns in the gallery ; but every sound was gathered up and swept along in the high triumphant loveliness of that wonderful great singing from behind the baize veil. There was no room in all the wide old house for any other sound. I could hear it echoing through all the wandering corridors, in all the sunny rooms where wits and rous, beaux and belles had been used to gather, to gamble and pay each other compliments, to plot and plan and make assignation. I could picture their blast shades, rushing noiselessly down the great carved staircase or peering wonderingly over the twisted bannisters, listening to that irresistible flood of melody. So it swept on. "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi." The words soared away up to a vast height of supplication, sweet with entreaty, overflowing with passionate sorrow a remorse so keen that its edge cut to the listener's very soul sweet beyond all description, unspeakably miserable. It broke on that great high note into a wild, harsh cry, almost horrible in its despair, the inarticu- late expression of a crucified heart. Sister Mary John reached forth her right hand and laid it on the singer's arm. She fell with her 35 The Measure of Life head buried on the nun's knees, and the organ burst into a swelling strain, carrying the litany on " Christe, audi nos ! " And Perdita lay still across the nun's knees, as of old Magdalen lay on the Master's feet, and I remembered that this was the House of Our Lady of Pity and was glad. PALINGENESIS TTLINOR'S garden is shut away from the outside *-' world by high walls of old red-brick, covered by fruit and rose trees. It is a strange old garden here, like some fragrant wilderness, overgrown, mossy, and sweet ; there, spread into velvety lawns and quaint old parterres, little rose-grown arbours and trellis-walks a delightful place to think in, to muse in, to be glad or sorry in. It is very like Elinor. That kind of garden takes some centuries to make ; it is almost as complex as a highly organized temperament in a beautiful body. In that respect it reminds me most of its owner, for she and her loveli- ness are almost as indefinable as the garden. In it there are many soft, mossy paths edged with box, and bordered with all manner of sweet-smelling, old- fashioned flowers and herbs, that lead nowhere. Perhaps one follows them eager and expectant, and arrives in the asparagus-bed, or among the melon- frames. But, as Elinor would point out to you, the asparagus is like a cloud of feathery, misty sunshine, 37 The Measure of Life that has strayed and been forgotten ; and beyond the melon-frames, the cabbages stand out against the dark soil in wonderful tints of absolute blue. It had occurred to me on various occasions that cabbages were really blue ; but one has not the courage to mention these things it is flying in the face of accepted tradition. So something was gained by following that narrow, green walk. But, on the other hand, one may wander in Elinor's garden and come on a sight so beautiful that it haunts the mind for weeks after just as her strange silences and little monologues do. Her thoughts are strange thoughts, for a woman wor- shipped and cared for as she has been, wrapped about by love from the lightest wind, with all the gratifications that wealth and position can bestow, that great personal charm and beauty, together with a golden heart, great sympathy and goodness can claim. Her slow, noiseless ways ; her soft voice, pensive and clear, with its sudden notes of deep passion ; her love of pale tints and , filmy laces, and the changing lights in her deep blue eyes ; all fit into the old garden as parts of the picture. I sometimes wonder if her ancestresses, who walked in it through three centuries, were any one of them so picturesque and charming as she. Her life is permeated by a passionless calm, a 38 Palingenesis soft peace and dignity that seem very strange to those who know she is a great artist. It is all so curiously out of proportion in itself, for there is no suggestion of struggle in her or her surroundings. Her career as a painter has been success from the beginning. She has genius ; but genius, as a rule, does not flourish in the sun. It demands sterner climatic influences. I wondered how it had grown and been nourished in the garden, till yesterday, when I went out in the dusk and walked with Elinor in the luminous afterglow that precedes the night. The sun had gone down on a stormy day ; the wind had been in her garden and strewn it with golden leaves. We went down to the very end and stood by the ivied wall, looking away over the cloudy asparagus to a wide expanse of sky, saffron dying into dull ochre, barred by long wisps of fine scarlet cloud dull, uncannily far off, and yet low. The violet mists rising off the flower-beds seemed to reach to the top of the wall and meet the sky amid the thinning leaves. Already the bare outline of the trees was showing, slim and graceful, amid the encarmined foliage. " This," said Elinor, " is like a fugue by Bach or Scarlatti crimson and gold and restful harmonies, with a suggestion of past storm and strife. Bach is the musician of middle age. He hushes the memories, 39 The Measure of Life is quiet and full of quaint dignity and subtle sops to emotion. Come away ; let us go to the roses." Her face showed with the pale clearness of a cameo against the dark furs she wore. She looked like one of the shadows that were supposed to haunt that very path. I laid hold of her to make sure of reality. Something in her perplexed me. In any other woman I would have recognized it at once. But in Elinor it was absurd. Something unfamiliar, obscure ; there was a revelation of tragical strength and tenacity about her that took my breath away. Down the nut-walk, under the hazels, past the old yew that was no longer young when Oliver Cromwell stood beneath it to interrogate Elinor's ancestors and namesake concerning the White King, on till we came to the glory of the rose garden, the arch of sweet maiden's blush, all fragrant with a late glory of pale blossoms. "This tree," quoth I, "thinks it is June. Yet there is a difference. What is it ? What makes the difference between the rose of October and the rose of June ? " " The difference is," mused Elinor, softly, " that June is the rose, and October the soul of the rose its embodied ghost." " Have roses souls ? " " We all have souls. You will call that Pantheism, 40 Palingenesis to share one's soul with the things that grow out of the kindly earth. But for all that, I am very conscious of it sometimes, and never so much as in this month of the year the twilight of the year, when Nature settles down to a long introspection. As for the June rose, I do not care so much for it. It is too blatantly conscious of its youth and beauty. But this ! Look at it ! It is human. Do you see its pathos ? Look past the outward perfection and colour and fragrance, and you will perceive that it blooms too late. It is too ethereal, too perishable. It is the likeness of love come too late. It is the remembrance of a power unrecognized till it was gone. It is an image of longing regret. Gather your October rose and it is shed, its petals are only held together by the memory of past warmth and sunshine. "Cruel as the grave," says the Old Book. Did you ever ponder on the cruelty of life ? Bitter life ! that takes all we treasure. Cynical life ! that leaves us only that which must be endured. Death, it seems to me, spares the things too light for it, too small for immortality, and thrusts them into our arms while they ache for the things he tears away. It is strange that the best of us in us can only blossom in the autumn. We plant it in June .and water it with tears of poignant anguish and despair. The 41 The Measure of Life unspeakable sorrow of youth. Then comes the long time of " Between," when we have lost all and gained nothing ; when we hang our heads in the sun of full summer, flowerless and bare of all but the dusty foliage that goes to hide our pain ; when we bear the burden and heat of the day in silence. On the verge of our winter comes the second blossoming the October Rose of Life. Its beauty, its charm, are all undeniable but not of this world. Beauty is always sad, but the October rose is the saddest of all sad things, because we know it is Palingenesis the flower of a dead happiness raised from its grey ashes, purged of all passion, all humanity, all hope. " What is it the Persian said so long ago ? ' All changes into fire and fire into all as wares into gold and gold into wares.' The October bloom of many a woman's days is raised in its loveliness out of the hell-fires that once raged within her. Do not be shocked ! It is the special ordeal of woman, that as she brought hell into the garden, so must she look once in her life out of the garden into the depths of the abyss. We all know it ; we all have endured its devouring flames ; otherwise there could be no Palingenesis." She stooped and drew aside the bloom-laden branches, revealing the gnarled and twisted stem from which they sprang. " Who would think," she 42 Palingenesis went on, " that all this ugliness was hidden beneath the smooth leaves and pale-pink flowers ? Look at its tortured convulsions, its crooked twinings. Had it been left to grow as Nature meant, it would have been tall and straight. But convention demanded it should cover this arch. And behold what the iron hand of circumstance, too strong for rebellion, has done. There ! Let us hide it again. Being a rose it bloomed just the same, perhaps the better for that inward pain and flame. Women do that too ; they are trained to such hideous contraversion of nature, and they cover it up with flowers. First in the June of their lives, when the nightingales are singing in every tree and the world swings abrim with the tide of love. The nights are long and warm, and the garden is full of the light of moon and stars. Then, after the burden and heat, the beauty and charm and fragrance return sevenfold, and every one looks and sees it is only shadow unreal illusion. " No man takes the October rose and wears it on a throbbing heart. It is the bloodless representation of a thing dead. No one quite believes in it; it is illusion, even to itself. Good works, faith, prayer, sympathies these are the sunshine of the flower that blooms in our autumn, and makes it a thing of beauty in that chilly atmosphere. It assures us of immortality, that in our ashes lies the perfection 43 The Measure of Life of ourselves, instinct for another summer. But those who have eyes remember the fiery flames through which it has come; and perhaps that is well also. It is dark in my garden ; the mauve and golden have sunk into indigo. Let us go in out of the night." 44 THE SHIP OF HEAVEN T T was at that strange time in the night when the * world no longer sighs in his sleep but lies wrapt in dreams. There are but few sounds in the world at that hour, and these are so small that one must needs hearken for them with the ears of the soul, because they are not made by mortal things, but by what has passed beyond to another plane. It was a white night ; little fleecy clouds had crept unheeded up the pathway of the sky, and fine as gossamer, thin and small, had overhung and covered the moon till the heavens looked like a dome of wavering, shifting white light Only the yews in the old garden stood very tall and straight, black against the sky, and the poplars whispered softly, though no wind blew among their loose- strung, multitudinous leaves, silver-green and silver- grey in the strange light. At the bottom of the garden, below the broken marble steps, the river ran, a level reflection of their quivering foliage. Along its sides the sedges and reeds tall iris and silvery water-lilies mirrored 45 The Measure of Life themselves in the deep, immeasurable blackness of the slow current. In its centre, where the water seemed to move not at all, the white clouds drifted to and fro, weaving a web of silence over the remote hour. All my windows stood wide to the June night ; I was alone in the House of Tears, save for the death- less shades of departed folk, sweeping up and down the stately staircase, or through the faded glories of the desolate rooms, where once they had feasted amid joy and laughter. Even as the old house looked out on the warm beauty of the summer night, so did also my own soul, isolate and lonely, where once she had been so surrounded by intimate delights. A moment had banished me from my peace only the perfume shaken from the folds of an old garment, the echo of a voice grown cold, and I knew there is no oblivion, the spoken word lives on and travels space for ever. Yet by-and-by, when the storm had overblown, there was again an interval, passionless and serene, when I sat and gazed out on the white night, and in that time my door swung open and one entered. I knew him well, the Weaver of Dreams Fion- tuin Master of Illusion. Once, when I was a little child, he found me in the sea-mist that creeps 46 The Ship of Heaven up the mountain-sides, and kissed me on the brow, on the eyes, on the lips ; so that I think his thoughts, and see his dreams, and speak only of those things he knows remembering always and forgetting nothing. Those whom Fiontuin takes for his own never completely belong to the earth. They are dual, and live two lives one with him in the kingdom of fantasy, and the other vaguely and uncomprehended in the world. They are Dreamers and Poets, Singers and Painters, Seers and Saviours they have the power to feel all things to make others feel all things, to see and make others see. They laugh and cry, and the world laughs and weeps with them. Yet in their hearts they dwell apart, removed by ineffable, unending sorrow. Great joys are theirs, boundless miseries, infinite delights and sufferings unspeak- able. They move the mountains, the song of the lark snatches them into ecstasy, and the prick of a pin brings the agonies of death. This because they belong to the Master of Illusion, and are what he wills. Fiontuin is immortally young ; his face is dark and pale, his hair black as night, his eyes are purplish-grey, his lips are cruel, but in his eyes lurks laughter always laughter and pity, love and pride. All love Fiontuin, but he loves few and only those who know him for what he is. A7 The Measure of Life He played upon a little pipe, made of a reed from the river greyish-green it was, as if but newly plucked from its cool roots and the song was like the cry of the plover, what time it circles under the low sky above the shadowy boglands in the dreadful hour before the dawn. " Come with me, Ashore," he said. " Come out with me, and I will show you a beautiful thing." " I am weary of dreams," I cried. " I will go with you no more. I have eaten Dead Sea fruit, and the taste is bitter. I gathered it in the land of dreams. Leave me, Fiontuin ; only the white night is truly mine." "The sun will rise," sang Fiontuin, "in a sky of rose." " There will be no more sun with me," I thought. " I have spent my life in visions, and disillusion is mine. I am awake, Fiontuin ; I will go with you no more. Leave me." He laughed as he stood before me in the white light, the reed-pipe at his lips, and his white fingers lifting off the holes, in a melody sweet as the sound of the sea on a summer eve when it turns shorewards over the stones. I could hear the slow drops from my own heart as he played, for the song was my own, made on a vanished day. 48 The Ship of Heaven " Yet come," quoth he, " and I will show you a wonderful thing." But I would not go. Disillusion was very bitter, and my dream had been the most beautiful dream in all the world. A cruel hand, relentless and vindictive, had taken and dashed it from a great height, so that it lay in fragments. My happiness had become like the fairy money withered leaves, shrivelled blossoms, an evanescent perfume. The gossamer clouds drove apart, and the moon looked down on Fiontuin as he stood leaning against the ancient carving on the wall, his eyes like wells of violet light, luminous with pitying laughter. "Oh, foolish one!" he cried. "Only at one touchstone doth happiness melt away into nothing- ness and dissolve and that is gold. Only a child of mine would have weighed love against riches, and looked to see riches touch the beam ! " He laughed aloud. His moods are like the wind; like his laughter the wind came up to him, driving the white clouds before it, billows of snowy foam on a high sea of blue. " And still," whispered Fiontuin, bending down to me, the little pipe against his crimson lips, " I will show you the Ship of Heaven." He went across the polished floor, casting no shadow on its slippery surface, his skin-shod feet 49 E The Measure of Life making no sound ; beautiful, young, immortal he stood in the dark doorway, mocking my sorrow with his tender smile. Yet I feared to go ; for the bitterness of remem- bered joy, is sweeter than the anticipation of new happiness, because the thing lost has been ours, the other never may be. He stood glancing over his shoulder, playing on the little pipe such notes of strange, compelling sweetness that I could not choose but go. A great longing sprang up in me to see the Ship of Heaven. Perchance I too might take passage therein ; and this even though I knew Fiontuin well, and that his promises were like the vows of love no more remembered after being spoken. I followed him through the echoing rooms, down silent corridors where the moonbeams played across the boards in prismatic glimmerings through the cobwebbed glass, down the great staircase where the shadows wandered up and down noiselessly, across the black and white marble of the hall, out into the balmy sweetness of the June night. The air was heavy with the breath of roses, with the odour of clove-pinks, daphne, and syringa, with honeysuckle ; they brought me fresh access of misery, for all these sweetnesses had once been a part of my joy, and poignantly recalled its loss. 50 The Ship of Heaven Fiontuin laughed again, and the wind hastened to hear him. Close by my side, he took me down between the rows of tall, swaying yews and whisper- ing poplars, where the moonlight came furtively and was lost in the interlacing shadows on the sandy path. Down by the river-edge at the broken steps lay the Ship of Heaven. Her hull was like hot gold, her sides were hung with long streamers of white cloud, her cordage lines of gleaming light, white and fine. Her sails were like the white mist that comes puffing off the sea, full in the scented wind ; her decks ashine like polished silver strewn with woven silks and fabrics wrought with jewels. Garlands of amaranth and asphodel hung over her sides, and all such flowers as grow upon the plains of Paradise. Her masts were thin spires of glass ; her bowsprit a fine shaft of white light topped by a star. She lay among the reeds and iris, with the willows reaching down to her, a vision of amazing loveliness, a wonder of white fire. But on her decks was no living soul ; no angel looked from her burnished sides ; she swung on the reluctant tide, no hand upon the tiller. " Is there no crew for the Ship of Heaven ? " I questioned in perplexity. Fiontuin laughed aloud, and shook back his long black hair. 51 The Measure of Life " She sails alone," he replied ; " and lo ! hither come the voyagers." A little child a little slender child, in a worn brown frock, came dancing down the pathway from the open doorway of the House of Tears. She was a thin little maid, with wide eyes and flowing hair. Thin and pale she was, and as the moonlight fell through the interweaving shadows about her feet she danced to it, as if it were alive and her play- mate. When the wind caught her long hair and spread it out about her, she wheeled and whirled as if the wind were a playmate also. Fiontuin blew a long, keen note as she passed, and I remembered Remembered her lonely, neglected childhood, shut up in the old house, with no friends save the wind and the trees and flowers, and thought of how Fion- tuin visited her and brought her happiness ah ! a long time ago. She fled along the white gangway that lay between the old steps and the Ship of Heaven, smiling at me as she went, and past me at the throng behind her. After her came a hurrying crowd, strange and motley men with hard faces and stern lips, women weary and haggard, youths and maidens, old men and bowed old women, and all bearing the marks of conflict, suffering, sorrow, or great poverty ; some wearing rich clothes and 52 The Ship of Heaven precious jewels, all with the same rapt expression, as if they beheld the desire of their eyes and were hastening towards it. As they passed, Fiontuin played on his reed- pipe ; now it was like a mother crooning to the baby at her breast, now it was a woman calling to her lover, now a man's voice, passionate and rich, and now the murmur of a child. He knows all sounds, all words; as he ringers his flute he plays on our hearts, making melody of what is in us. Silently they passed on the Ship of Heaven till her shining decks were covered. " Where," I questioned, " on this little river is the Port of Heaven ? " The wind blew out the streamers and the ship flamed on the night like a glory. "The Port of Heaven," echoed Fiontuin, "lies in each human heart ; but the river winds and twines so that only this ship can navigate it." "But if Heaven lies in each heart, wherefore journey in this ship?" asked I. Fiontuin put the pipe to his lips and danced to its music as the child had danced to the moonlight He came near and took me by the hand, and his voice had the sweetness of the blackbird's note in that little dusk that comes after the dawn. " The ship," he laughed, " they could not go without 53 The Measure of Life the ship, for these are the Disinherited who depend on the charity of my children for their dreams. And the ship is a child's thought The little child do you remember her, Avourneen ? who. danced. She told the dream to a singer, so that many heard, and it became the thing you see, a vessel, splendid and glorious to carry these, the Disinherited, to their lost kingdom. They will awake, these poor ones, and some will recall the glimpse they had of immortality. Some will remember but a little ; some will only be heavy burdened with the knowledge of their dream, but so full of sordid aims that they only grasp after the sweetness. of its intangible beauty in vain. What I would ask you ; what are riches the riches you longed for a space since in comparison with the pure splendour of a child's thought ? Is it a less precious thing than a purchased love ? I looked after the Ship of Heaven, with wide-set sails, spreading golden effulgence on the dark, slow waters as it sped swiftly on with its burden of haggard, wretched humanity. All the skylarks awoke and fled heavenwards as the light fell on their grassy nests, thinking the sun had come, so that the ship was heralded by music such as greets the day. The wind puffed after it, swaying the trees and shaking the perfume from each sleeping flower. " The riches come and pass. Who has them ? " 54 The Ship of Heaven asked Fiontuin. "What brings happiness? Only dreams, only thoughts. All, all is my handiwork. Nothing is real save the thought that frees the soul from its bonds of flesh and sets it voyaging on the Ship of Heaven. There is no reality, save Love." Afar in the darkness the Ship shone like a star, the clouds came over the moon again, and the night drew white, the wind waxed riotous among the branches and set them swinging wildly ; the leaves murmured like heavy rain. I turned back to the House of Tears, and on the threshold stood a tall angel with folded wings. " Tell me," I whispered, " where is Heaven ? " " Deep in each heart," said the angel. " And who may go in ? " " Only the pure." "Alas ! " I cried. " Who is pure in heart ? " "Those who go in by the Gate of Sorrow," he answered ; and, as he stood aside to let me pass, I saw in his hand the grey-green reed, and knew him once again. " Oh, Master of Illusion ! " "Aye!" he laughed, blowing a new note. "All, all is illusion. I have seen all things come and all things pass. There is no reality, save that which is thee. The soul alone, that is thee. Only in dreams is truth, only in dreams is happiness. I govern all 55 The Measure of Life the world ; kings and princes, powers and princi- palities bow before me. I bring their dreams ; I am the only Beloved. The best of every heart, of every soul, is mine. Cease to look back on what is lost ; it never was thine, else it would be thine still. We can only lose the thing that is not our own. Dreams are best. Send them out like the Ship of Heaven to carry the disinherited. Farewell ! " " Stay ! " I entreated. " Nay," he said ; " since thou wouldst still say that if I remained for ever. Farewell, the night calls me ! " I heard his reed-pipe as I climbed the stair among the hurrying shadows and looked out on the garden from my window. Afar, on the edge of the world, glowed a great lone star ; I knew it was the Ship of Heaven, with her cargo of weary souls. From the wind-blown trees came the tremulous song of the thrush awaking to a new day. "FOR AS THE SOUL DOTH RULE " TT was almost dusk when I came to the little bridge and stood for a moment to take in the picture. On the left lay the mirror-like stretch of the reluctant Brent, unruffled and slow, with the barges piled along its lowermost reach, filling up the perspective with smoky browns and dull reds ; beyond, the green fields and orchards darkly crimsoning to the coming spring. On the right lay a wide expanse of cultivated land, bounded along the towpath by a thick hedge of thorns, and running a brief course into the furrows was a tiny branch of the river, crossed by the little bridge on which I stood. On the edge of the water the hedger had made a great fire of thorns ; they blazed up in the dusky atmosphere with a merry crackle, reminding me of the Wise Man's contemptuous simile ; beside it stood the hedger, pressing down with his fork a fresh addition to the flame. He was a tall, old man, stooping forward a little 57 The Measure of Life as if feeling the burden of his age, but bearing it with a contented cheerfulness. His legs were encased in leathern gaiters and his hands in clumsy leathern gloves. His face in the firelight showed ruddy and wrinkled, but the eyes were gay, and the mouth had an upward curve that bespoke an unregretting mind. His tall, old figure, holding the thorn-fire down at the end of the pitchfork, was outlined against a vague distance of dim violet brown, the colour of the up- turned earth, lined in wavering furrows with grey- green, the young vegetables just planted and still drooping in the February airs. The hedges melted away into warm mauves and dim browns and reds, as if the fields were some illimitable steppe heaved up against a mysterious sky full of drifting pearly cloud, slow as the dreaming river. A woman came out of the obscurity behind the fire and stood beside him without speaking an old woman, dressed with a tidiness that was almost exquisite. Her curt petticoat showed a pair of small slender feet in Lancashire clogs. Her thin bosom was crossed by a tartan shawl, the ends tucked into her belt. There was a white kerchief round her shrivelled neck, and a black sunbonnet on her thick white hair. Her features were fine and regular, and her eyes sweet with content ; her expression 53 " For as the Soul doth Rule " such as one sees in the old Italian pictures of the Madonna. She had a hoe in one hand, and she leaned against it as she stood, evidently weary after long work on the brown furrows. The man put one arm around her, and drew her back till her head rested against his shoulder. " Tired, owd lass ? " he asked. "Aye, lad," she said contentedly, "just a bit." " Well," he told her comfortably, " we'll be goin' now there isn't more'n a handful ; " and he pressed down the crackling thorns on the fire. " Sit 'ee down," he said suddenly, spreading a sack for her on the withered grass. She sat down, and looked, with her chin in her withered hands, at the glowing fire. The flames leaped over the smouldering redness below, singing, sinking till it was only a heap of drifting ashes, light, almost impalpable, flying on the dusk like fairy snow. " Ready, Jinny ? " He held out a hand to assist her to her feet. " Aye, Geordie." She lingered, looking on the smouldering pile of burnt thorn. At that moment a blackbird began piping through the dusk from a tree across the river, riotously jubilant, as the blackbird always is when he thinks of spring. " O-o O-o ! Lo-o-ove. Joy ! joy ! joy ! " 59 The Measure of Life The woman smiled up in the man's face. " Hark to that ! " she said softly ; and into her face flashed for an instant all the beauty of her long-past youth. "He'll be thinkin* of warmer weather belike." The man looked up with a whimsical expression at the tree-tops, and a barge came slowly out of the dusk, its lights lingering down to the river-bed in quivering scarlet lines. A boy poleing from the sides was singing to him- self quietly. The words came sweet and clear as the blackbird's note " I think of Jinny with the light brown hair ; Her face is in my heart, and I see her everywhere." Geordie stooped at the sound and touched the old woman's lined cheek with his lips, and she laughed softly as they moved off together across the loose brown loam. It was near the end of their day a day begun with labour in the fields, and which found them at its close field labourers still he hedging and ditching; she hoeing, weeding and transplanting a son and daughter of Mother Earth. Want had been their portion often. How could it but be so? Poverty always, and unceasing toil. But that thing more precious than crowns or thrones or wealth incalculable, the one thing in all the world that must be given and cannot be bought, was theirs Love. 60 "For as the Soul doth Rule" " Joy ! joy ! joy ! " sang the blackbird after them. Ooee ! Ooee ! Joy ! " There had been a contented joy in the woman's laugh, a deeper content in the man's tone, as they vanished together into the amethystine shadows. I wondered what had kept the joy and content from the dawn of their lives till now that it was so near the night ! I wondered if the simple life is not, after all, the best life, the one that leaves most in the end ? Amid the striving after riches, the noise and clamour of countless battle-cries, this quiet happiness in the fields seemed a marvellous thing. Do riches bring indifference ? and power that fulness of gratification which kills desire, and leaves the mind all emptiness ? When even the wise have gained all, it brings but loathing. The grasshopper is a burden ; the cistern holds no water. Boundless desire brings but the illimitable melancholy of satiety. The day's work brings the day's happiness, the night's deep slumber and content. The primeval curse was also the primal blessing. The best of all lives is that spent in work for those we love. The idler can never know the sweetness of love gained by sheer worth. His days cannot be brightened by a tenderness unbought, unsought, coming in youth to ask, " Where hast thou been so long ? " and making 61 The Measure of Life its home in the heart for aye. The old song had brought to Geordie a vision of what time his Jinny's hair was amber-tinted like the morn, and even I, who knew her not, had seen the beauty of her soul looking forth from its darkened cottage. The mere physical loveliness decays and is no more, even in remem- brance, unless that soul-beauty lies behind. Their lives had been spent near the brown earth, with the fragrance of the upturned soil in their nostrils, the growing things ever under their eyes, all the in- numerous secrets of Nature told in their listening ear. The birds' songs, the wind songs, the rain in their faces in sun and shower, they had worked on till the tale of years was almost spent. Presently they would go down together to sleep in the placid bosom of their Mother, and be at rest. Sun and wind and driving cloud would sweep over them, and they oblivious to them all, their time being sped. "In great wealth," say the Brown People, "is much forgetfulness." Perhaps. It might be possible to remember if one had great possessions, but not very probable. And riches cannot buy love nor yet content. In the old Morality play Everyman goes down to his grave, having appealed in vain to kinsfolk and riches, strength, beauty, discretion, and wit. All 62 "For as the Soul doth Rule" leave him at the last save Good Deeds alone, who will accompany him to his dread reckoning. But there is one other that must have gone down with him to the " low house " and that, Love. Love that many waters cannot quench, that is stronger than the grave and victorious over Death. A little wind came up and stirred the white ashes off the dying fire and covered me with soft flakes of fine ash. It reminded me somehow of a story beloved in my childhood "Snip, snap, snurre, Basselure! The song is ended." But we who know, find it has but begun. THE WATERS OF TIR-NA-OGE T MM ATERI AL things," says Plato, " are the * highest and greatest and only show in thought and idea." Whether the thought comes in what we call waking or what we, for the want of knowledge, call dreaming is irrelevant. It is another and more subtle thinker who declares definitely that "only the idea is real." The thought alone has actual life and being. And there is yet another thinker who asks, " Can thought originate within us ? " doubting the fact, proving its impossibility. " All life is but a dream," says he ; " thought, a remembering from a far time passed by." Those who read Homer might think this the truest of all sayings those who read Shakespeare, Virgil, Ben Jonson, Empedocles, or Pythagoras ; because the vividness of their style and diction is not so much creation as the impassioned recital of the one who has seen and remembers. Empedocles frankly acknowledges that he does remember. He alone out of all those who sway the world of thought can return with certainty and recall what he was. 64 The Waters of Tir^na^oge There is an old Erse legend, that those who sing as Homer sang have drunk deep of the waters that flow through Tir-na-oge, " land of immortal youth." These cannot forget, for with that draught in their veins they are half in the land of dream while living in the land of fact. They can lay hold of the minds of men and show them what they will, lull them to peace with visions of love and beauty, or rack them as with fire and sword. " With wasting fury, as a flood of flame Rolls o'er the ground its waves." When one speaks with effect like that, make sure he has drunk deep of the waters of Tir-na-oge, and is but remembering what he has seen. It is the idea put into deathless being. And that man may die, but his words will live on, governing men's minds, holding and guiding ; driving them to deeds of heroic valour, to splendid self-sacrifice or glorious bravery. Great souls who have this power know but little of the riches or splendours of this world they inhabit for the time. They have wooed Liban, daughter of the Wave. Theirs are loneliness and suffering want, perhaps, and poverty ; to be scorned and passed by, to travel on foot while vanity and insolence flaunt on soft cushions along the way. But little they mind 65 F The Measure of Life who have tasted the sweetness of heather ale and eaten of the Fairy banquet, spread under the green gloom of Tir-na-oge, among the Deathless Folk, while the birds sing in the blue. Even to those who have it not, it is apparent that what sways the world is not of it, but belongs to the Immaterial, the Spiritual, and has no kinship with the mortal part at all. The souls of men recognize the abstract idea, and bow down to it. It is the idea alone that forces men to great acts, to mortification and endurance, to nobility of aim and end the soul striving to subdue the body that it may enter into its inheritance, and remember. Once, while I had no thought of such happen- ing, I met one who remembered. I think she must have remembered from the beginning, as those do who have drunk often of the Waters of Dream. With most of us the soul-memory is brief and transient. We are suddenly about to see all when the spiritual impulse is gone. The curtain of oblivion drops and the soul-memory is darkened. It may be that the veil of flesh is too heavy to be held apart, unless it is worn thin by long suffering and tears, by many journeys through the cobwebbed gate which opens on the past. But this one of whom I am about to speak remembered clearly, and spoke with certainty of 66 The Waters of Tiivna-oge what she knew. While her feet yet pressed the ways of life, she looked back on what she had passed, and saw it all. There had been a great storm the night before wind and hail, lightning and thunderings. Across the river a line of ancient apple trees, that had been my delight in the spring and early summer, was marked by gaps, where the storm had laid one prostrate here and there. It was in the dusk of the twilight, and I had paused to look at the line of scarlet fire, drawn athwart the pearly blueness of the mists rising off the fields below the tender chrysoprase of the still summer sky. Little whirls of pale blue smoke were rising from the cottages below the bridge ; long lights trembled down to the river-bed from the deep-laden barges in the lock. Men and women sat indolently enjoying the calm of the evening hour. The silence lay down there deep and still, as if civilization were not thundering by, twenty yards off, impelled to speed by the harnessed fires of heaven. A woman came up with a long, smooth tread and halted beside me to look down on the level river, reflecting all the heights of the calm heavens. A tall woman, whose hair beneath her cotton sun- bonnet lay white as the rime of winter, whose high, delicate features showed clear as a cameo against 67 The Measure of Life the dusk, almost luminous against the dark old buildings over the river. Her eyes shone darkly beneath black brows, thin and level ; her mouth was firm but very sweet. She balanced a bundle of apple-twigs on the grey stone parapet, and looked me in the face with a strange smile, the smile of one who knew me well. I saw her hands were stained with soil, her grey dress was fragrant of the earth. I remembered having seen her stooping over the weeding in the fields along the towpath. " You are taking home a fire," I said, touching the apple-twigs. She smiled down on me, serenely dignified, and I seemed to know that smile dear and familiar. " When the nights close in early," she replied in a soft, far-off voice, " a fire is good to look at in the loneliness." " The river also," I went on, though that I should have said such a thing to one whom I had never seen before did not occur to me as strange at that time. " The river recalls much to me." Her eyes rested on the mirror-like level where the barges lay clustered together. "I remember this place also," she said ab- stractedly, as one who recollects a vanished sorrow. " The tall-necked galleys lay among the grey reeds 68 The Waters of Tir^na^oge along the shore. It was later dusk than this, with a new moon, faint and white, and we hid in the rushes, waiting, waiting. The ford was red, and only a few of us remained." She pushed her bundle of apple-twigs a little on one side and looked down across the water. " It is a long time past," she mused softly. " It was deeper then, and wider. The lush meadows are gone, the wind no longer whispers in the rushes at eve. They have hemmed it in and covered it. The days were long before the Romans came, and very sweet. All is clamour now, and confusion." " The Roman galleys ! " It flashed across me that I had heard of the Roman cohorts having come up this little waterway from the Thames, and taken the road to London. Then I was suddenly smitten with wonder that a woman who had been working in the fields should talk with the air and accent of a princess. She smiled at me again as she steadied the bundle of twigs. "Cannot you remember," she asked. "But no! It is only when the soul is very strong that the barriers can be broken down. You were ever the weaker one. Some day, like me, you will remember what lies between Death and Time, but not yet ; perhaps when we come together again, as we were at the Mill of Oran, on the day it ground the red 69 The Measure of Life wheat that was your life and mine. Oh no ! I will not tell, though I know what and who you are ; and I know you well." She laid a hand on mine, as it rested on the grey stone, and I, looking up at her in the twilight, was suddenly aware that we two were standing in a green wood, on a hillside overlooking the hidden sea. Below us lay a wide and endless plain, covered with a misty obscurity, violet and brown, merging away along the vague horizon into a dense purple blackness. Across the vague, intangible shadowiness stretched a wavering line of silver, that was now glitteringly bright and now darkly effulgent, as if it caught strange fires or was covered with strange vapours. That was a river. Overhead the sky was white, with a moon in it red as blood. There was no wind, no faintest stir in the hot night, and all the dense atmosphere was permeated by a mysterious pungent odour, repellent and horrible. Terror and horror in my soul recognized it as the smell of blood blood that was flowing on the plain below in torrents. Faint as the light was, I could see her leaning against an oak bough that grew low from its trunk, her mantle of spotted green flung back, her face white and drawn, peering from her waving brown hair, her bright eyes devouring the darkness while we waited. Woe lay upon us, great 70 The Waters of fear, bitter sorrow. Suddenly out of the misty dark- ness came a man in a tightly- fitting jacket worn over a white kilt, all bespattered with red. His feet were stained red in their laced coverings of deerskin. The gold tores on neck and arm were dull and wet, his shield hung from a bleeding hand, and his downward pointing sword, short and heavy, dripped at the point. He flung himself at her feet, saying no word ; across his body our eyes met. " They go out on the flowing tide ! " Up through the dusk came the lapping of the flood-tide as it covered the yellow sand. The mists lifted and showed us the long waves lifting the fair- haired warriors as they had fallen, sword in hand, shield on arm, while the battle still roared on. I knew it all so well ! The high, rugged headland, showing purple against the sky, the boundless ocean beyond, the curving circle of the little bay Clontarf, with the plover crying over the vanquished dead ; Clontarf on the night of sorrow after the day of partings. Dead ! Locked foot to foot, hand to hand, with the fierce Northern invader. And the fight, the useless fight, raged on between the mountains and the flowing sea. I looked again, and we were on Brentford Bridge. She was lifting her bundle of apple-twigs. " Tell me who you are ? Who am I ? " 71 The Measure of Life She smiled sadly enough, and waved her hand towards the crowd below. " Shadows all ! " The echo of her words followed on her footsteps as she vanished into the twilight. "Shadows all!" Shadows of the reality, vainly striving after the immaterial things, to which they do but belong. A motor flashed past me with a hooting cry. Another shadow, a phantasm less real than the unforgetting mind, that had but an instant since stood over the bay of Clontarf, and seen the long-haired Gael carried out on the flood of ocean, and heard the wailing cry that told of his death, who could not be bought or persuaded to do the thing that was wrong. THE HEIGHT OF THE STARS T T was dark along the shores of Coolmaine. Their * outline heaved tremulously up, vaguely dusk and formless above the running wave. The woods hung low along by Cluan-an-uishga-geel, with never a breath to stir their multitudinous leaves. Some- where between us and the wide swell of ocean a woman was singing in the Erse a sweet, wailing melody with all the passion of despairing love in its haunting many-vowelled refrain. " Es chi dee-ee-eeich, Mavourn, Ma-vourneen slawn ! " That was the cry of love, hopeless, longing, deserted, over what would return no more. The dip of the oars in the long green wave, as it billowed silently out from behind us in the dark and went swiftly onwards to shatter itself in foam on the rocks before, made a soft, continuous accompaniment to the lovely melancholy of the rich note. There would be no salve in this world, would soothe that hurt of which it sang. 73 The Measure of Life There was no moon that night. Looking shore- ward, the waves broke in phosphorescent gleamings ; a flame of white fire ran round us as we went, and rippled tumultuously in our rear. A low grey mist lay over the sea, making it white in its greenness, but overhead shone all the planets, whirling in their spheres. " I wonder," quoth one, " what is the height of the stars ? " and another made answer, " I have read that the height of the stars is the stature of a man's soul." Now I felt this was a hard saying ; but wisdom awaits one in unexpected places, and confusion follows on untimely questioning. It was not the hour or the place, but I thought of the question and the answer, speculating on it within myself. There was a distinguished philosopher who said, " Hitch your waggon to a star." I wonder why he said that? For he, of all men, must have known how little likelihood there was, once the stars swam into a man's horizon, of his cumbering himself with a waggon. He would no longer have need of it, for one may not travel to the realms of light and air save by the way of the spirit and on the feet of the spirit. And on that way prince and beggar are alike, in that they are as man was in the beginning, when he stood among the beasts in Paradise their friend, 74 The Height of the Stars perhaps, but certainly not taskmaster or tyrant. The waggon would be useless, unless the man foolishly attempted the way, drawing the waggon himself, unknowing that he who travels that route leaves behind him the burden of possessions as likely to hinder and impede his progress. Those old mystics, who sought incessantly for the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher's Stone the liquid that would make immortality certain in this world ; the stone that would transmute all baser metals into pure gold taught a profound and beautiful philosophy, great and wonderful truths, mostly culled from the wisdom and learning of the East. Among other things, they set forth that a man, to rise, must do so on the ashes of himself; that to all spiritual heights the Magus must ascend through bodily and mental suffering. They must, as St. Francis did, fight with and conquer the body and subjugate the senses till they became fine and exquisite servants of the soul, opening doors into the unknown, teaching the wonders and might of the Creator. Men have reached to the stars from the beginning of days, and always reached from the same height : the measure of the stature of their own souls ; and a soul can only grow when all that prevents and dwarfs 75 The Measure of Life it is taken up and cast forth. Diogenes reached the stars from his tub. Plato from his garden. St. Francis out of his narrow cell. But how much did each cast away from him before the heights were gained? To each his own bitterness, to each his own sweet. It is Circe who offers at first a cup running over with nectar. There are thorns about the goblet we drink. Its waters are dark and harsh on the lip as we set out for the light above. And perhaps nectar is sweeter among the stars. How shall we know, who have never tasted aught but bitterness here ? The ancient Magus who set out on the Hidden Way began with a forty days' fast and purification. Afterwards he lived as the very poorest bread and fruit and water were his fare. He bathed winter and summer before dawn ; regulated his hours of sleep, lest sloth should lay hold upon his soul in its absence from the body. He had to be scrupulously clean in person and clothing, to speak seldom, and to be in penitence. He was warned to choose his points of contact with the world, and to concentrate his energies within him on the thing he sought to achieve. Knowledge came without warning when he was prepared for it and he saw the way. It was but a dream, that Elixir of Life, that wonderful stone. No mortal might ever find them, 76 The Height of the Stars because they are not in the scheme of things. They belong to a step higher, a time when we have reached the heights, and they are no longer necessary, or even desirable. Who will crave for the elixir when he understands life ? And of what use the stone to one who knows that which gold cannot buy ? I think perhaps many of those old mystics found what they sought, but found it other than they expected, and despised it The alchemist might quaff the elixir and find himself still what he was, for the rose and blue of Dawning cannot be held back, or the gold and white of Noon, hence it is well that Evening should fall in her garments of dusky grey ; each has its charm and happiness, and the night comes when all sleep to wake again afterwards. Yet for all it was a dream it taught much, for it showed the way to the stars was open to that one who mastered himself. It stands to-day as when the old alchemist spoke it : " That if a man formulate his desire, an it be a high and praiseworthy desire, and a holy thing an he work upon it immediately it will come to pass; for to him who thinketh it, that thing is already begun." When a man can restrain all impulse and has mastered himself, he can be no other man's servant. He who reaches to the stars will not be in subjection. 77 The Measure of Life But after the victory over the mere body comes the strife with the passions ; they must all be conquered in turn. Mylittla is not for him as wife or mistress she brings disaster ; even to common clay, which has no aspirations, she is alternative delight and mournful mystery. The Magus avoids her. Even St. Chrysostom warns the aspirant. "For what," he asks, " is woman but an enemy to friendship, an unavoidable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable misfortune, a perpetual fountain of tears, a mischief of nature overlaid with varnish ? " "Amor febris species!" It must be, like all other maladies, overcome and passed. Hate and fear and hunger they are for other and weaker spirits. Determination is surely the means to all ends, call it by what name you will. As God Himself is eternal and unchangeable, so has He made this world and the creatures He has set in it with a yearning, never ceasing and imperishable, for the heights above. The trend of life is higher and higher still. It has no pause ; even with apparent extinction the body itself goes on, the soul also. In Southern India, on the great Nilgiri Plateau, from which rises a majestic and inaccessible 73 The Height of the Stars mountain called the Mukate Peak, there lives a strange, primitive race, the Todas, who have many mysterious traditions and fine thoughts. When a man there draws near to his end, and especially if he has lived a holy and ascetic life, they gather round to watch him pass. When the death-sweat beads his pallid face, when the breath comes quickly and strained, when the heart labours and the lips whiten, they say he is climbing the steep sides of the great Peak on his way to the stars. And afterwards, when the breath ceases and the limbs are still and straight, they say he has departed into " the neighbouring country." So will it be, I think, with many a one who is reaching to the stars. He will get there to find himself in a familiar neighbouring country. The boundary may be within touch any day here, now and we cannot see it till it is passed. When we pass over it is the moment surely of attainment, and that moment may be, as in the East, the moment following on the Great Renunciation. The Buddhist makes the renunciation by leaving everything he possesses and going forth in the beggar's yellow garb to make his soul. It is possible in the East to do that, but under these Northern skies things are differently disposed. The Great Renunciation is made otherwise, and often we are 79 The Measure of Life wearing the mendicant's robe and rattling the little wooden basin by the peepul trees of life, and no one is the wiser save the stars we reach to and the Master we feebly emulate. We are living in a fourth dimension, where we appear to be what we are not. It is very true, I think, that a man finds in life only that which he brings to it, and sees only that which is in him. So that it might appear some are born with full vision of the stars and disregard them till the supreme moment arrives, when, like the King of Babylon, they stand at the parting of the ways, with the arrows of divination in their hands. It is a foregone conclusion that these will choose the difficult and upward path, and go with bleeding feet and grasping hands to higher things ; bridging the mountain abysses with the cross ; making their own miseries and sorrows and losses stepping-stones on to the neighbouring country. I cannot tell, either, if it is good altogether to forget the ritual of love and hate as the old Mystics taught, for the atmosphere of the stars is very remote. But doubtless for we have been shown it is easiest to attain them over the scoria of our burnt-out passions ; for only the purity and holiness of the soul remain unconsumed in the intensity of that splendour of light which is the full knowledge the being as God and seeing the good and evil. 80 The Height of the Stars And so I would say, also, it is the broken hearts that fill the world with music. They sing as the girl sang in the dark, over the moonless sea along the shore of Coolmaine. Surely in her despair a woman reaches the stars sometimes at heights undreamt of by sacrifice, and that is the strangeness of love to woman. For as Melusine is death to the spirit of the man, so Eros is the soul-creator, bringer of life to the woman ; and that which the man renounces as the cup of Circe is often to her the goblet of sacrifice, sanctified with prayers and vigils and bitter tears. There are many ways to the stars, all of them lonely and steep, and all wet with bloody sweat. Surely at last they merge upon a plain in the neighbouring country where all distinctions are forgotten, and each finds the thing sought. 81 BORROWED DAYS AND STRAYED T HAVE seen in the gloom and mirk of the great * city a day come stealing up the wintry ways that was pure summer summer at its sweetest, with a high blue sky, flecked with white, as if Hermes were driving a flock of lambs over the pathways of heaven a day of radiant peace and sunshine, swept by a singing west wind, the wind of romance and mystery, suggesting a happiness impending and unfulfilled. That sun and wind permeate the roaring tides of life with a sudden sense of youth. The sap quickens in the city trees, and moves the barren branches to beauty ; they paint the grey buildings into the like- ness of a dream. Here a touch of sheer violet in the long vistas, there a pearly haze which blurs harsh, forbidding outlines into mystic obscurity. The lions in the square, the grey-green of the icy fountains tossing into the bronze basin, the gigantic dome of St. Paul's, with its circling flight of silvery doves, are component parts of a loveliness thrust on the rejoicing eye with a curious haste. For the summer day that 82 Borrowed Days and Strayed comes in winter has but a brief time to stay, and it must needs make haste to show us what it can. Hard faces relax, grim faces smile. There is a quickening of hand and heart and eye on this day. The world is unaccountably happy. It is a renewal of youth in the soul, as it is renewal of summer in the air. In the Black North of Ireland they have a saying about that day. They call it a " borrowed day," and tell each other "Summer will be payin' back the winter the day she borrowed in her prime." But in the wild West, where the green Atlantic surges up against the shore, the Erse folk have another way of speaking of that day. They think it a day that has been lost " strayed." " This will be a day that lost itself, God bless it ! " they say. " May it be a long eve, for it is good to the poor." It is good to the poor ! Maybe it comes after long weeks of hail and cold, bitter frost and the " blight," that most cruel of all winds, dreaded of the poor, stealing noiselessly along the low boglands and over the bare hills, wrapping the world in an icy mantle of yellowish grey, bringing with it bitter misery to all. The roads are like lines of black glass, hard and impervious. The bog cotton-stalks, the loosestrife and ragweed, the faded heads of meadow-sweet, and the low bushes of whitethorn, grass and dead flower 83 The Measure of Life and seed, are all alike erect and still in their garment of grey rime. The very airs are perished with the cold cold almost beyond human endurance, so keen is its touch and breath. Up to it comes the strayed day, and is hailed with blessings. The heartache is not so poignant, the pinch of hunger not so intolerable. It is as if Apollo wandered fluting through the land, thrilling all hearts to a passionate joy, the joy of youth and future, the happiness of things to come. The beauty of hill and wind and sky may have been ours before ; but in this day we take a new and peculiar delight in our possession, because something has been removed that once marred it. Aeolus thrusts all the winds into a leathern bag, binds it with a silver cord, and gives them to our keeping all the winds save one, the wind of mystery and love, the singing, sweet west wind, that pipes over the world with songs of pearl and opal in high wild strains of joy, or deep, quiet notes, serene as ocean on the flow. The strayed day is flowing over with music ; all the birds sing in it with a fervid passion ; the wild bee wakes to murmur for an hour. They also are asking God to bless the day, amid bare boughs and leafless branches. And I think there are strayed days in life too. We get blue summer days in harvest-time, in the 84 Borrowed Days and Strayed winter's frost and fog, when the senses are dulled and perception all but lost. The most terrible thing in age is the absence of future. There is no more all is at an end. It will be like waiting for the eyes to close over the tired brain. Age is so weary! Too tired perhaps to go on too weary to continue the unending retrospect. And into this winter-time comes suddenly a day from the June of life. Very likely it would not have considered it a theme for thankfulness had it come at its proper time, but now what words can describe the bliss of reawakened youth ? This comes to prove its immortality that it lies in the soul ready to wake at a touch. Not all the months of life from April till October end could hold the sunshine of this belated summer day. Age has been stooping under its burden, sad, morose, and silent ; it has forgotten how the throstle sings, or what the wren says to its tiny mate. It is a long while back, since there was a whispering on the bough, or since it saw the purple bloom on the hills. Life has been so drear. All night ! " So I have all the night Of my sweet youth thought ; And alas ! I wis Gone is my bliss." Age has been thinking like that. Mourning in his soul, saying with Dante, over the sombre mists of 85 The Measure of Life hell, " Bruna, bruna, sotto 1' ombra perpetua." It will be so for ever. If one offered length of days to Age at that time of thinking, it would be to hear an answer such as Cormac, the son of Selbach, gave the angel. Cormac had lost love and youth and wealth, and become an anchorite, who dwelt with fasting and mortification in the oak wood of Darragh, and there he was captured and bound by the Pagan hordes under Turgesius. Three times did an angel free him from his bonds, and three times did Cormac consent to his death with gladness. "What?" he cried; " shall I return to the dark of life, with the glory of Heaven before me ? " And so he died. If the glory were his in the end, who can tell ? It is certain he had somehow shut out the strayed day ; for we all think like that till it dawns, and sets our blood dancing as it did in childhood. When Immortal Youth springs forth in us the gloom and misery, the chill and loneliness of our winter-time is wiped out. We remember it no more. It is June in our hearts for one day, and in it we live a thousand days gone past and all their gladness. What if it be December for the rest of the world ! They too have their strayed and borrowed days, and can rejoice also when their turn comes. The preacher will tell you, " This is compensation." 86 Borrowed Days and Strayed But it is not that. It is conviction proof absolute of the immortality that is in us. The feet of middle age do not tingle to dance on the pavement with the tattered gutter child. It does not go lilting joyously along the ways, or restrain with difficulty the laughter and jest that bubble to the lips. No ! but on the strayed day it feels all these things, for it is in the June of its life again, and realizes it is perpetually young, immortally glad. And the heart of Age is cold, but on this day it overflows with love for humanity as it did in the time when great love was its own portion, the portion we share with others, the tribute to Dis, paid in our hours of joy, lest the immortals see it and be envious. " To the stones be it said " the heart is always young. We may, for all we know, be younger when we come to the gates of the Valley of Transition than when we were ferried over from Oblivion. Wasted perhaps by scorn and doubt and misery, overlaid by the shadow of an obscure fate, and carrying the torch of extinguished passion ; but we may have shaken off the weight of unguessed ages behind us in the living of these borrowed days. We may pay for the hours of charm with years of wretchedness and isolation. But what of that? It 37 The Measure of Life is enough surely to remember the music and warmth and glory of that day, when the blood leaped tumultuously through our sluggish veins, and tinged the cheek and throbbed in the heart once more. Only for the length of a day ! To sing and laugh from sun to sun, to feel again the irresponsible delight of life's springtime. It may seem too high a price, but it is not. Perhaps it depends on ourselves that day if the price be too high or no price at all. When we have broken the callous bonds that held us and feel we are akin to all the suffering in the world, to all the happiness and joy ; when we recognize with thankfulness our fellowship with the gutter child, dancing grimly on the wet pavement, the price is small very small. For are we paying it entirely alone ? The day is yours, but the blight is in the souls of others ; the keen frost chills the springs of being for multitudes. Take of your sunshine the sunshine that is like palpable gold, and can be gathered in the hands and bestow it on the others. You may never have another Borrowed Day while you live. But think it the one gold piece in your purse, and offer it just the same, and you will see a miracle. It is as if you offered charity to a beggar in the highway, who, taking your solitary coin, led you suddenly to the King's treasury, and, thrusting Borrowed Days and Strayed precious jewels upon you, said : " Take these, for they are yours." You will take them and go forth to hear the new song in the wind, see the new blue- ness of heaven. To reap a harvest, sown in the Borrowed Day. THE SUNLIGHT OF THE SEA T REMEMBER a night in the Persian Gulf * moonless, deep in its violet blackness as a purple passion-flower, with no stars in the dim hyacinthine vault above, and a sea black as glass, smooth, level, unbroken, and unmoved. No whisper from wind or tide stirred the tense silence of the hour ; the ship swung on the tideway languid and listlessly, as if feeling the weariness of the heat and the burden of the silence. Now on this side she glided over an abysm of darkness, now on the other showed the thousand lights of Bussora, city of sin and strange things. Suddenly, on the lower deck, a boy began to sing to his lute, in a soft, girlish contralto, and his song was of a lover, betrayed and deserted, who, wandering beside the sea, finds on its sands a piece of yellow amber, and remembers it was once a tear, shed by his love on a long-past day when he was the faithless one, even as she in the present was faithless to him. I leaned over into the soft velvety blackness and listened with that curious vague sensation which 90 The Sunlight of the Sea haunts us all at times of having once heard the song and story before. But when and where, for that moment, I could not remember. The voice ceased with a dull twang from the little lute, and a balmy coolness blew across the burning decks, soft with the breath of rain-drenched rose-blooms from far-off gardens on the desert edge. I called into the dark, " Boy, sing again that song of the amber tear." Back came the answer from the lower deck, softly clear " Lady, I can sing no more. The Samoor blows my lute is unstrung." Then I remembered that while the south wind blows no lute or violin can be tuned, because that balmy wind renders the strings so soft, and there is no song while it lasts ; for what minstrel in the East, be he Hindu or Persian, will sing without the tinkling accompaniment of his little lute ? Still the song haunted me, the low sobbing refrain, the passionate regret, and still I wondered where I had once listened to it before. The ship swung round again in the Samoor, and the sea was rippled into long lines of pale green fire, and far as the eye could see lay a galaxy of floating stars, shedding moonlike radiance through the lucid waters. All the darkness had gone, the night was 91 The Measure of Life now outlined in moony sheen. It was as if the ship had slipped her anchorage, and slid, like a towering bulk of misty cloud, into a firmament fallen on the sea. Never had I seen so strange a sight, yet instantly it brought to me the fugitive remembrance after which I was striving so vainly. I remembered in a flash the story of the amber tear. It was in my childhood, by the stormy sea of Moyle, late in the gloaming of midsummer eve, while the Bel fires were still blazing on every little hillock and tall crag. And on the shore with old Brigid I found at my feet a piece of yellow amber shaped like a tear. " An' that will be a tear dropped by Lir's daughter while the charm was on her that held her over wild Moyle," said Brigid. "Ah, now! 'tis a long while she wept before she heard the church bells ring on Eire." I stood, with the dark yellow amber in my palm and the sound of the restless waters in my ears, while old Brigid sat on a flat rock and related that sad history, which is the chief of the three Sorrows of Story-telling. " But, Brigid," I remonstrated, " how can one weep tears like this ? It is like the sun when it comes over the sea in the morning ; it is warm and smooth, and smells so sweet ! " 92 The Sunlight of the Sea " An' why not, Aroon ? " answered Brigid. " Wasn't it the golden youth of her her beauty an' her long- ing an' her love ? Her tears had a right to be all that ; for didn't she weep herself into them ? An' they do be sayin", Machree, that they who find her tears will be sheddin' many themselves, but will ever have the power to make others forget them." "Come home now," she added, "for the Little Good People do be goin' by there, an' 'tisn't good for the likes of you to be in their way this night." She pointed out to sea, and I saw every sullen wave-crest tipped with faint white light. To her it was the Fairy Court travelling from Tory Island to the mainland. Knowledge would have told her in vain it was but floating shoals of almost impalpable sea- creatures driven before some far-off storm-wind the first thoughts of Creation, mysteriously aflame without fire or heat. So when I looked over the ship's side into the sun-kissed waters of the tropics, I went back to that childish day and remembered old Conal the Weaver piercing my amber tear and stringing it on a length of scarlet thread that I might wear it as a talisman and pray, like the Pagan Princess, who waited through all the long centuries with her brothers, that she might save their souls and her own by her long and terrible self-sacrifice. "See now," said Conal, as he put it round my 93 The Measure of Life neck, "the only thing we have when it comes to the last is what we have done for others. Mind ye now, ma creveen cno." So it was with the daughter of Lir, so it is with us all when we give ourselves for others ; our souls weep tears of amber, imperishable and fragrant, for in them is the essence of our youth, our gladness, our joy. Sorrow comes in the midst of sunshine and lays a spell on us, transforming us into wild swans, so that we leave the dull earth and soar heavenwards, seeking consolation in the grey clouds. Strange it is that all our sorrows come through those we love ; and love, while it charms us out of ourselves, gives wings, while desire ties our feet and kills the soul eternally. We must all suffer, because through all the ages the soul thirsts for immortality, and knows it can be gained only in one way by laying life down for love's sake. We must not say, " What is this one to me ? " for though we may not know that one at all, yet to- morrow it may be that one is the other, whom we must ransom from death, or who will ransom us. The meaning of life is hidden till that time comes that we soar high above the ocean of human misery, weeping over it as it ebbs and flows for ever between life and death. And happy they whose tears are found long ages after on the shore of time, and are strung on a scarlet thread, to lie on the pure heart of 94 The Sunlight of the Sea a child, bringing such thoughts as may come through the pink lips of the ocean shell, where the sea mur- murs, ever complainingly to the ear. Nor may one say, " What matters it where we go ? One is forgotten in Eternity." There is no Eternity other than this in which we are. It is as if a child made a circle with his finger in the sea, and said, " This is Time ; I live in it ; nothing outside concerns me." It is not given to every eye to see outside that invisible line drawn by man's finger on the soundless waves of being ; nor to every ear to hear the death- less song through which the amber tears fall into the deep. Yet the one who sees and hearkens is worth all the unheeding thousands who cannot ; for to that one is revealed the hidden truth, the reason for the earthly sojourn, the meaning of the struggle, the cessation of longing, the perfection through pain. As the lover in the Persian song remembered a time when he, the unfaithful one, sowed the seeds of unfaith, so whoso finds the amber tear may recall the loveliness of sacrifice. All beauty, all comfort, must come through suffering. How can we under- stand what we know not ? And only the initiate can enter in. This life is like a mighty wheel between the life that was and the life to be. It is the Wheel of God on which we are thrown, to circle giddily in many revolutions through the abyss of space, till we 95 The Measure of Life have forgotten the baseness of our origin in our high destiny. The clay is thrown back and back again, cast into varying shapes, into many forms, till at last it stands complete, a thing of beauty, perfect and finished, to rejoice high heaven. The Wheel of God is suffering. None may be marred by His awful hand. But it may be so that we mar ourselves and cling to what we are. And it always so happens that to those specially chosen for tears comes the love of laughter, craving for joy. The soul that suffers most is that soul formed in exquisite proportions for bliss. It is the gladness, the happiness, the love that is wept into amber tears, so that they reflect sunshine through the dark seas into which they fall, and lighten all the gulfs of human woe. What is sympathy but an amber drop, golden and translucent, cast on a scarlet thread about the neck of Misery ? And it is better to weep such tears, even under goad and whip, than to be but a crackling of thorns, consumed in idleness and remembered no more after. In being solely to ourselves we lose the right to be. The only life, the only happiness, our sole claim to immortality, is what we do for others. Our joys, our hopes, our smiles, live after we are gone, like the tears of Lir's spellbound daughter. The sunlight of life, 96 The Sunlight of the Sea beautiful, golden, smooth, and sweet-smelling, glowing centuries after we have passed on, with the heart's love and consolation we gave out of our own bitter agony, and happily found and treasured as a holy thing to ward off the power of evil. 97 SILHOUETTES TT was very silent in the House of Tears. Outside A the multisonous cryings of the tempest ; but within, the vast quiet of unbroken ages, the gloom and obscurity of height and depth untenanted, darkness brooding over marble and carving, over wide hall and oaken stair. Invisible, the presences that haunted the great house passed noiselessly up and down, in and out of the panelled rooms, and out upon the gallery where once the musicianers sang, while a king feasted with the wits and beauties of a bygone age. Here and there in the fleeting moonbeams a painted face, a figure tricked in all the finery of the past, gazed out for an instant and vanished into the gloom again, as if borrowing for one moment the long-perished life wherewith to look out again curiously on an age that had forgotten it. The moon, white and full, looked straightly in at the tall old windows, throwing a complex mass of dancing shadow on the polished floor. Long I watched them to and fro on the glassy surface. 98 Silhouettes Presently my eye was caught by other shadows on the window glass fine, ethereal, exquisite, swaying, dancing, weaving strange patterns on the vacant glass, now tossing to the cornice, now wavering gracefully to the stone ledges, filling me with a dreamy delight in their mysterious loveliness, thin as lace, intricate, marvellous in their finish and proportion. Twigs already budding to the distant spring, branches, boughs, and trunk stood out in velvety blackness on a clear white brightness of moonlight in the storm : a whole gale roared and rang through the melancholy concourse of ancient trees that gathered in sad communion round the old house. What mystery of loveliness was this among them, outlined on the dim glass of the old windows ! Full of the charm and delight with which the swaying shadows had filled me, my eyes travelled out and above the clamorous tree-tops to the sky, swept by the roaring wind to a hyacinthine blueness, where the moon swam blazoned in argent, attended by one great golden star. On the very lowermost edge of the horizon the gale had banked up the clouds in a mountainous pile snowy white and cold. Below it the river ran, a gleaming thread of obscurely-shining light, on a dim violet plain, whose boundaries ran vague and imporous, towards an outline of luminous white, an outline that 99 The Measure of Life might have been the confines of Elysium, bordering on the dim plains of Hell. In the misty moonlight, and with the winds, that plain seemed covered with throngs of crowding ghosts, hastening to taste for an instant the semblance of vanished life. The night brings metamorphosis ; it makes all things strange and unfamiliar ; it is a potent magician a great painter holding a palette charged with but few dim, fugitive colours doubt, mystery, uncer- tainty black, purple, white ; with these he makes glamour. I sought in it for the tree that cast such beautiful reflection on the window-panes, thinking how lovely the substance would be that threw such shadow. It was very old old and bowed and gnarled, twisted past all belief, as if it had sunk contorted beneath the weight of untold years. It made an impression of desolate misery on me, as if I had come suddenly in the wind and storm upon some bent old woman, shuddering away from her loneliness and age, deserted, hideous, forgotten. Yet the shadow on the glass was graceful, happy, young, dancing with the delight of all young things in the rushing wind, weaving patterns of happiness, exquisite thoughts, as if moving to gay melodies. A strange thing that ! and bne that moved to strange thoughts. Presently I thought that the moon saw that tree as it 100 Silhouettes was truly, before two hundred years of sunshine, of storms and rains and snows, had hidden its sem- blance from mortal sight. The form cast on the blank glass was the reality, stripped of outward excrescences and disfiguring crookedness, the soul of the tree in its beauty. I could not see it ; I was too near the brown earth, too blinded by its limita- tions ; but the moon, far above all the mists and glamour, saw it truly and set it forth on the mirror- like glass, against the night and storm. So it came to me, as I looked, that as it was with the white acacia so it might be with us also. How many of us who are ungainly and crooked to the mortal eye would throw, in the moonlight of clear- seeing, a shadow that was all beauty and youth? The beauty and youngness of immortality, some there are on whose soul-casement the shadow falls perceptible even to the dullest, set out in lines of light against the dark. With others it is merely a glimpse again, we guess at its presence, but never see it at all. And I think it may be that the shadow is the reality, and the reality only shadow : the shadow that melts and decays, and flies out on the wind of Eternity from the crucible of the great alchemist Death. And it may be also that those who present them- selves to us in forms of strength and harmonious 101 The Measure of Life proportion, pleasing to eye and mind, may cast a shadow crookedly enough in the moonlight of per- spective ; things evil in their ugliness, undiscovered till night and storm make metamorphosis of them. Surely beauty shown like that is the expression of God, and ugliness that of Evil, because both are spiritual in their quality, and convincing from within. It is the hidden reality that impresses itself on the world that counts in the end, as having been lovely and pleasant, or revolting hideousness. Drab mediocrity is too insignificant for damnation, too commonplace for the realization of eternal bliss. There came to my mind, as I stood watching, the remembrance of a story told me by the Brown People on a sea-girt islet in the far Pacific the story of a lover hidden by enchantment from the woman who sought him, as Psyche sought Eros ; amid pain and travail of soul and body. How, when at last she found him, he was changed into the likeness of an old man newly dead, propped against a peepul tree, and she weeping in despair, made of her tears a pool on the grass, and, looking therein, saw the face of her lover, and, bestowing on the old dead man the three kisses of faith and life and love, brought him to her arms in all the freshness and beauty of his youth. The hidden reality invisible to the eyes was mirrored in the glass of her sorrow, as the outline of 102 Silhouettes the tree was cast upon the glass. Only the substance of the immortal part showed in the reflection. The gods showed themselves to men by a light which shone visibly from them, setting them forth in the likeness of humanity, made as men, only more beautiful, more stately, perfect. So in the light of truth we may look past the twistings of infirmity and age, sorrow and sickness, and see the loveliness, the strength and youth, that lie hidden away. "Aurum in comis et in tunicis, ibi inflexum hie intextum" (The golden fibre shows in every hair, the golden thread in every tunic). But it seems to me that it must be pointed out to us by " the Lord of terrible aspect " mighty, un- conquerable Love, and through tears. He stands by us, as he did by the Florentine, weeping, till through his tears we see, as the moon sees, clearly, with no mists between. Lord of Life and Death, as he is, we must needs do his bidding, and see what he wills, otherwise he is our Medusa, and we are frozen into stone, losing all semblance to humanity, petrified into our own image. It may well be that the moment of clear seeing is put off till the wind from beyond the grave tosses the branches high, and throws the shadow on the darkling glass. We may keep no white nights, for the thinking of long thoughts, that go out beyond 103 The Measure of Life life, to the life to come. And we may, like the Roman Emperor, "live as on a mountain," remote, with the things that most concern us. And happy they who see past the substance to the reality that is in the shadow, and to whom come the storm and darkness, and the presence of the dead with the perception that goes past all preten- sions and disguise, to the living, actual truth, which can recognize the substance in the shadow and the shadow in substance. 104 THE GOLDEN RULE T) Y what rule shall we regulate life so that we may "*^ attain to a perfect knowledge of ourselves ? Science can tell us little. It stands on the outer edge of a hidden world all belonging to us, but which we cannot claim, for the reason that we are so ignorant of it. Now and again the gloom which covers it lifts a little, and we learn breathlessly some truly astounding fact concerning ourselves and our destiny. But so far no traveller has returned from the far bourne to assure us certainly what we have been, what we are, and to what we go on. It was in the dusk of a summer evening, and I walked with Elinor in the old rose-garden. The twilight had come very "close. I had seen it creeping slowly off the inner garden across the wall, drifting in pearly wreaths over the close-shaven lawn, under the droop- ing branches of walnut, beech, and hazel. A low-growing maiden's-blush had surrounded itself with a cloud of sweet heady perfume, its pink- ish-white blossoms showing vaguely through the fragrant gloom. From under it, as we passed by 105 The Measure of Life came a halting little white form and sat on the box- bordered walk before us. " That is the poor crippled white cat," exclaimed Elinor ; " I must speak to her." She knelt down on the path and stroked the cat gently, murmuring after her sweet, compassionate fashion the while. The cat had lost its right front leg. It lifted the remaining paw and patted its mistress softly on the cheek three times, then crept away under the rose again. Elinor remained on the path, gazing up at me in surprise. " Oh ! " she gasped, " I feel as if she had reproved me for pitying her." " Perhaps she did," I ventured ; " how can we tell ? She may understand why she was caught in the trap and maimed so horribly." " Perhaps," repeated Elinor, helplessly ; " but I do not know." She rose, and we resumed our walk in silence that lasted one round of the old-fashioned garden. " Murgien/' began Elinor, abruptly, " I always feel with that poor little thing that she is under a spell, and she comes to me, looking up with human eyes out of her pretty animal head, and begs me to remember the word that will set her free. ' Alas ! Snowy,' I say, ' I do not know it ; ' and we sorrow together for a moment before she creeps away again to hide. Do 106 The Golden Rule not smile at me. I think I see in her eyes the agony of a soul in durance." I went homewards through the summer dusk, thinking over this, along with other things, and wondered to myself at the little we know, what we are, where we are, what surrounds us, whither we are bound. It was hot and breathless in the dark hours ; there was no moon, and a storm was working up in the motionless atmosphere. Presently, with one clattering snap, the tension broke and the rain came down, a soft pattering of thousands of fairy feet on the thirsty leaves and grass. I sat at my open window rejoicing as if I were some green thing. The keen sweet odour of wet earth, of drinking grass and leaf and flower, filled me with a passion of delight. The fragrance of elder-blossom, of rose, and privet spires, of drenched mignonette and carnations, rushed up to me in joyous gusts, as if it were the happiness of the growing things in which I had my part ; for I understood it all. My friend Fiontuin, the Master of Dreams, who cannot but show the truth, touched me in the sweet warm gloom, and showed me a vision of Being, beginning in the kindly brown earth Hertha, mother of all living, to whom we all return, on whose bosom the grass grows and the flowers bloom, sinless and 107 The Measure of Life joyful, swinging in sun and wind. To love a thing perfectly is the result of perfect knowledge. The understanding of a thing can only be gained by being. Might it not be that our love of flower and leaf and tree, of the green grass and the flowing stream, is because the life within us has come through and permeated them all ? The disciples of evolution tell us we cannot be immortal, that there is no soul in us, because we have risen by slow and painful stages from one degree to another, till we have arrived at our present stage. And what if we have ? What if the All- Wise Master has, with infinite pains and carefulness, brought us stage by stage up the ascending planes ? Is that to say there are no more to climb ? If the Life has pulsed joyfully in leaf and bloom, in this or that creature on the plane below, is there not the more reason to think that hidden away on the plane above are other and more beautiful stages of being ? I have seen in the eyes of the maimed white cat just such a look as one might see in crippled humanity. Who is to tell us when the soul comes ? or what example our dumb dependents are taking from ourselves, so much farther on in the journey? I think the Great In- tention is beauty. Everything in creation is formed with such beauty, such grace and perfection, that one must needs see that. But sometimes the Intention is 1 08 The Golden Rule marred and broken never by suffering or sorrow : but by what is called pleasure what is certainly selfishness and sin. It must be sin to be ugly, for no good thing is made other than beautiful. The exertion of will is surely the greatest factor in life, and we can will ourselves to beauty by the performance of beautiful things compassion, pity, tenderness, charity not in the giving of alms, but in love and compassion for our kind. All these make beauty ; they can show through all disguise as the expression of God-Love. And love is beauty. So that in not living beautifully we are hindering ourselves in the ascent, hampering our progress, making stumbling-blocks of ourselves for others. The East teaches that those who think unkindly, who speak evilly of others, who are guilty of gross pleasures, and who subserve their wills to the desires of vanity for the sake of advancement in this world, will be born into crooked and ugly bodies in their next existence. The woman who betrays her friend, the man who sells his opinions, will come again, in the likeness of their thoughts, deformed. They make themselves. In the East I have heard a woman say, " Oh ! I cannot do that ; I would be born next time a hunch- back." That may not be true. On the other hand, he 109 The Measure of Life would be bold who would say that it could not be so, for even in this life we make ourselves. The miser, the evil-speaker, the drunkard and glutton, and those who deny the claims of humanity ; those who ignore the poor, the suffering, the outcast ; see how they have made themselves ! Furtive eyes, hard mouths, unlovely jaws, forbidding countenances. They have no love, so no love is theirs. The false, the wholly mean, the unreal, have no beauty ; theirs is the hard and stony afterwards, for even here we have a choice of ways. We can make ourselves as we will, beautiful or otherwise. Paracelsus says that the young of lions are born dead and must be waked by their parent's roaring. So one might think that the evil we have in us is dormant till we come in contact with the world ,and it is waked by the roaring of our passions. It wakes and sleeps and wakes again. Yet men have fought with lions and conquered because of their own intuitive knowledge of the beast the thing they were. It is as if the brute speaks to the human across a hidden and narrow gulf, of which there is no knowledge how it was crossed, or if there is a way back. Yet, looking down on it from where we are, we are suddenly assured of the other and higher stages to which we are climbing through great dole and affliction. no The Golden Rule We grasp back at the knowledge we possess, secure in its truth ; with it we can realize also the beauty beyond, higher and nobler than we can yet comprehend. The Master shows the way ; the rule is brief and unmistakable only over our dead selves can we attain to higher things unknown and past all human thought and expression. Zoroaster had a rule which taught him who would control " The Operations of Life." It taught purity of mind and body ; that to be immaculately pure in mind and body was to attain to perfection of Spirit ; and the Spirit which knows all things is beautiful, because is is all things. He might not in his pro- bation satisfy his hunger or thirst, but was taught to share all he had with the poor and suffering. He might not refuse the cry of any, or wear soiled garments, or look upon a gross thing, or possess money more than what would purchase for his immediate needs. He was not allowed to talk much the will grows best in silence, in hunger, penitence, suffering, he learned his lesson. He abjured idleness and forgetfulness as being the enemies of Will, and the Will is Spirit and the Spirit Power, and Power meant the stage above humanity, where hunger and thirst and cold would no longer need fighting or the Passions to be overcome. He was permitted none of what we call the in The Measure of Life pleasures of this world because they hindered his progress. "Extreme love causes loathing," said the Rule. " Vanity leads to abasement ; uncharity and much speaking to loss of all power." And he was taught to consider himself as the dog, as the horse, as all and every creature might be so had he to look upon himself and suffer with their wants. Thus gradually the Flame of Life soars upward to the blue and loses itself beyond, where we may not see. But of this there can be no doubt : that it is only by the Golden Rule man may so regulate his steps that they lead ever upwards in the scale of Being. And the Rule may be summed up in one word Love. Love is beauty, and beauty is perfection. We may gain them both, surely, by wiping out the ugliness we encounter. It may be, then, that there we would find the memory of suffering would be consumed in the splendour of intense loveliness wearing the guise of a physical and intellectual perfection, beyond our knowledge now, but to be revealed. And what if we sorrow greatly and are torn and bleeding and broken on the bosom of Mother Earth ? " Ferrum, flamma, ferae, fluvium, saevumque venenum, Tot tamen has mortes una corona manet." 112 THE HOUR OF SILENCE ' I V HERE is a day in Life to which we come * through chaos. We have walked with the Pit of Fire on the left hand, and on the right the Deep Waters. We have come through fire and storm and flood, and find ourselves at the foot of a mighty mountain aspiring through the clouds. That day is the Day of Bitterness, and in it is the hour of silence, when all the clamour, the brazen outcry, and the weeping ceases. There is no help in heaven or earth no looking back on the pleasant valleys, the grassy flower-clad meadowlands, the song and happi- ness and laughter. The love with which our hearts brimmed over for all mankind because of the love that was ours, the fervid, passionate joy in being. We cannot look beyond the fire and tempest ; it is as if that time had never been, as if we had always dwelt, desolate and alone, in the still mists at the foot of the great barrier, shutting out all hope, all expectation, all desire. There is no life in the soul that day Being has come to a standstill. It hangs suspended, swooning, after the bitterness of the 113 I The Measure of Life ordeal. It has no present, no future, no past. It is like a pool of water in the burnt-out crater of some volcano, reflecting nothing but blank mists. That is the waiting-time ; in it we pass all earthly things and can no longer be touched by suffering such as we have known by pain or loss or hope. We are past it all, reflecting nothing. The time will be like winter grey, with rolling fog that shuts us off into a grey silence. There is a folding of the hands, not in resignation but in impotence. The head is bowed ; there is a sense of finality, of void and emptiness. All things have been proven, and all have failed us. The storm and clamour are over ; there is no more. All is finished done : It is the end. But into the blank silence comes a still small voice, unheard amid the roar and fury : " Be still, and know ! " And so the soul is still and learns its lesson of power ; learns that the past was but a portion of its appointed ordeal and task that in it lay no gain, no strength, but only weakness and failure. The mists roll away and show us the aspiring path, not so impossible or terrible as it seemed. There is, as it were, a veil rent from before the eyes. We see what had been hidden before clearly and distinctly. Things appear as they are, not as we had made them be. We have acquired knowledge 114 The Hour of Silence in the silence, knowledge that could never have been ours had the way not led through the Waters of Affliction and the Fire. We are conscious of a change : we will remember hereafter to judge no man, and least of all ourselves, for we have now the measure of the wind and the weight of fire : the essence of those things that are only gained through suffering, the height and depth of which cannot be expressed by mortal speech the heritage of those who follow by the Way of Tears. In that hour we can look back again once more on life and see it, like a river, rising in the hills, splashing and foaming, wasting itself in whirling eddies and furious rushes aside, this way and that ; racing over the level, falling hurriedly down the steep places, gleaming, laughing in the sun all prettiness, noise, and bubbles, useless, idle, shallow. Then, lower down, widening in its bounds and taking on, little by little, the burdens of the peasant folk who live along its banks : carrying the sweet-scented crops to market in the long, flat-bottomed barges ; kissing the children's feet at its edge, still laughing, leaping, curling when it can, till it is at last confined in great gates and bound in servitude a bearer of burdens, black, polluted, and changed, bearing on its broad bosom the wealth of nations, wearily urging to the sea. Calling for it, hungering for it, yet hindered The Measure of Life and kept back ; yet the sea calls to it night and day, stealing up among the tall ships and deep-laden barges, the white ocean steamers, and the ships of war. " Come ! Come ! " sings the sea, " and be at rest with me. Be clean and young again ; " and the river beats against its bars and swirls around its high bridge piles, hastening to that cry. It widens and spreads into still water. It is strong now, and there is no hurry, no idle foamings, but the steady, irresistible swiftness of the current ever gliding on, grimy, black, and weary, till at last it meets the kiss of the wide sea and mingles with the tides of ocean. So it is with us while we stand before the mountain of Despair. On the other side lies the sea, smiling, dimpling, whispering in the sun. It calls, and we gather up our new strength the strength born of silence and isolation and climb to the heights, to look upon its face. All the noise and clamour had brought nothing. It was meaningless ; " sound and fury, signifying nothing." Only the bitter water could have washed away the scales from our eyes, and only the silence could teach us power. We 'look upwards and see the beauty of the heights above, and lo ! the mountains pass into our 116 The Hour of Silence possession. We can live on them now, who had but so short a space since been unable to breathe in so fine an atmosphere. True, the joys and contentments of life as we have known it can no more be ours. The exquisite agony through which we have come has changed our form. The old garments no longer fit. We have outgrown them. So the soul looks on the thing she suffered for and is lost in wonder. " Did I love that gross thing ? " she cries. " Can I have worshipped an image of clay ?" But she had worshipped, and her discovery of the baseness of the idol has cost her the pangs of hell. The price for clear vision must be paid, and it is always the same, it makes us anew, and removes us from the plane on which we learnt the bitter lesson to another where we see all things different. The spiritual nature is slow to wake ; only the touch of fire can stir it into being, and it has many metamorphoses, many stages of evolution. The Pagan Hero who descended into the land of the Dead and sacrificed to the Shades returned not himself, but another. After Dante had seen the Lady of his Love in the fields of asphodel and amaranth he was not the same. We cannot be the same after descending into the deeps. We are changed and new. I think most of us are like Tarn 117 The Measure of Life Lin, in the old Celtic ballad. We are, like him, held under a spell we cannot break save by knowledge alone. Under the compelling hand he became a snake, a dragon, a wolf, a tiger, and at last a bar of red-hot iron. The molten bar was dropped into the dark waters of the holy well, and Tarn Lin emerged in his true self, rid of all the loathly spell which made him love his evil enchantress and slight the real woman who dared the powers of Faery for his sake. So with us ; we come through many dire meta- morphisms till at length we are ourselves, stripped of all shams and pretence and falsehood, at the foot of our mountain of despair alone in the silence to climb to the summit in our new being, powerful and strong. When the silence ends we have learnt so much. Now there is courage to look on the past and see things as they were. We recognize the worthlessness of the thing for which we bled. See how utterly out of all proportion to its value were our pangs and agonies ! It is as if one paid a king's ransom for a handful of glass beads taken from the neck of a courtesan. We know, seeing them with open eyes, that they are not precious. But remember that in the light of the day that is gone we thought them worth the price of a soul. They would go ill now 118 The Hour of Silence with harp and crown cheap, common things, only fit for the dust and clay, the overturned wine-cup and the draggled board. The suffering we have endured for their sake was terrible while it lasted. But it was ordained for us that we should enter into our kingdom by that way, and better that way than never at all. Even if the kingdom has been ravaged by fire it is the cleansing fire, such as sweeps over the dry and barren bush. Behind it lie the scorched and blackened acres, over which the heart weeps and mourns bitterly. But the clouds come after the flame with the slow-dropping rains ; and, lo ! a new beauty beside which the old beauty was as nothing. So when the command comes and we are bidden to " Be still ! " let the soul, fainting under its torture, take courage and learn to be strong. It is not the end only the beginning, and the ocean of love lies on the other side of the mountain where we wait in the Hour of Silence. 119 HELL-SHOON T REMEMBER as if it were but yesterday an A afternoon in my childhood when I sat astride the old garden wall at my home, holding a basket into which Terence, the gardener wise old Terence of the tuneful voice had been dropping the yellow- red fruit from the espaliered trees against the warm bricks. We were watching a procession pace slowly, mournfully along the wide high road towards the little church on the hill. It was a day in late October, a warm, still, golden day. Through the thick yellow sunlight the gossamers floated slowly on their mysterious voyages no- whither. The thorns across the road had clutched with a hundred hands at the laden wains as they passed, and seemed as if they were embracing streels of golden light amidst their scarlet leaves and crimsoning haws. The thistledowns stood erect like globes of silvery fire, without the loss of one single spear of airy radiance. The late honeysuckle stretched over a flame of blazing dog-wood puffing vague fragrance on the waiting time even the old wall 1 20 Hell