is not even a coefficient.
As expressed in Sordello, "Divest mind of e'en thought, and lo,
God's unexpressed will dawns above us!" "Thought?" the Canon goes on
to say, "Thought? nay, Sirs, what shall follow was not thought:
I have thought sometimes, and thought long and hard.
I have stood before, gone round a serious thing, tasked my whole mind
to touch it and clasp it close, . . . God and man, and what duty
I owe both,--I dare say I have confronted these in thought:
but no such faculty helped here. I put forth no thought,--powerless,
all that night I paced the city: it was the first Spring.
By the INVASION I LAY PASSIVE TO, in rushed new things,
the old were rapt away; alike abolished--the imprisonment of
the outside air, the inside weight o' the world that pulled me down.
Death meant, to spurn the ground, soar to the sky,--die well
and you do that. The very immolation made the bliss;
death was the heart of life, and all the harm my folly had crouched
to avoid, now proved a veil hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp.
. . . Into another state, under new rule I knew myself was passing
swift and sure; whereof the initiatory pang approached,
felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet as when the virgin band,
the victors chaste, feel at the end the earthy garments drop,
and rise with something of a rosy shame into immortal nakedness:
so I lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill into the ecstasy
and out-throb pain. I' the gray of the dawn it was I found myself
facing the pillared front o' the Pieve--mine, my church:
it seemed to say for the first time, `But am not I the Bride,
the mystic love o' the Lamb, who took thy plighted troth, my priest,
to fold thy warm heart on my heart of stone and freeze thee
nor unfasten any more? This is a fleshly woman,--let the free
bestow their life blood, thou art pulseless now!' . . . Now,
when I found out first that life and death are means to an end,
that passion uses both, indisputably mistress of the man whose form
of worship is self-sacrifice--now, from the stone lungs sighed
the scrannel voice, `Leave that live passion, come be dead with me!'
As if, i' the fabled garden, I had gone on great adventure,
plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit, and feasted to satiety,
laughing at such high fame for hips and haws, and scorned
the achievement: then come all at once o' the prize o' the place,
the thing of perfect gold, the apple's self: and, scarce my eye
on that, was 'ware as well