Towards dawn he awoke. O what sweet music! His soul was all dewy wet. Over his limbs in sleep pale cool waves of light had passed. He lay still, as if his soul lay amid cool waters, scious of faint sweet music. His mind was waking slowly to a tremulous m knowledge, a m inspiration. A spirit filled him, pure as the purest water, sweet as dew, moving as music. But how faintly it was ihed, how passionlessly, as if the seraphim themselves were breathing upon him! His soul was waking slowly, fearing to awake wholly. It was that windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and strange plants open to the light and the moth flies forth silently.
An entment of the heart! The night had been ented. In a dream or vision he had known the ecstasy of seraphic life. Was it an instant of entment only or long hours and years and ages?
The instant of inspiration seemed now to be reflected from all sides at once from a multitude of cloudy circumstances of what had happened or of what might have happehe instant flashed forth like a point of light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance fused form was veiling softly its afterglow. O! In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had e to the virgins chamber. An afterglow deepened within his spirit, whehe white flame had passed, deepening to a rose and ardent light. That rose and ardent light was her strange wilful heart, strahat no man had known or would know, wilful from before the beginning of the world; and lured by that ardent rose-like glow the choirs of the seraphim were falling from heaven.
Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of ented days.
The verses passed from his mind to his lips and, murmuring them over, he felt the rhythmient of a villanelle pass through them. The rose-like glow sent forth its rays of rhyme; ways, days, blaze, praise, raise. Its rays burned up the world, ed the hearts of men and angels: the rays from the rose that was her wilful heart.
Your eyes have set ma ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
And then? The rhythm died away, ceased, began again to move a. And then? Smoke, inse asding from the altar of the world.
Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from o rim to rim
Tell no more of ented days.
Smoke went up from the whole earth, from the vapoury os, smoke of her praise. The earth was like a swinging swaying ser, a ball of inse, an ellipsoidal fall. The rhythm died out at ohe cry of his heart was broken. His lips began to murmur the first verses over and over; the on stumbling through half verses, stammering and baffled; then stopped. The hearts cry was broken.
The veiled windless hour had passed and behind the panes of the naked window the m light was gathering. A bell beat faintly very far away. A bird twittered; two birds, three. The bell and the bird ceased; and the dull white light spread itself east a, c the world, c the roselight in his heart.
Fearing to lose all, he raised himself suddenly on his elbow to look for paper and pencil. There was her oable; only the soup plate he had eaten the rice from for supper and the dlestick with its tendrils of tallow and its paper socket, singed by the last flame. He stretched his arm wearily towards the foot of the bed, groping with his hand in the pockets of the coat that hung there. His fingers found a pencil