From that moment he began to be restless, and was more feverish than
usual throughout the night.

Up to this time he had spoken little, was depressed with a suffering to
which he could give no name--not pain, he said--but such that he could
rouse no mental effort to meet it: his endurance was passive altogether.
This night his brain was more affected. He did not rave, but often
wandered; never spoke nonsense, but many words that would have seemed
nonsense to ordinary people: to Robert they seemed inspired. His
imagination, which was greater than any other of his fine faculties, was
so roused that he talked in verse--probably verse composed before and
now recalled. He would even pray sometimes in measured lines, and go
on murmuring petitions, till the words of the murmur became
undistinguishable, and he fell asleep. But even in his sleep he would
speak; and Robert would listen in awe; for such words, falling from
such a man, were to him as dim breaks of coloured light from the rainbow
walls of the heavenly city.

'If God were thinking me,' said Ericson, 'ah! But if he be only dreaming
me, I shall go mad.'

Ericson's outside was like his own northern clime--dark, gentle, and
clear, with gray-blue seas, and a sun that seems to shine out of the
past, and know nothing of the future. But within glowed a volcanic
angel of aspiration, fluttering his half-grown wings, and ever reaching
towards the heights whence all things are visible, and where all
passions are safe because true, that is divine. Iceland herself has her
Hecla.

Robert listened with keenest ear. A mist of great meaning hung about the
words his friend had spoken. He might speak more. For some minutes
he listened in vain, and was turning at last towards his book in
hopelessness, when he did speak yet again: Robert's ear soon detected
the rhythmic motion of his speech.

'Come in the glory of thine excellence;
Rive the dense gloom with wedges of clear light;
And let the shimmer of thy chariot wheels
Burn through the cracks of night.--So slowly, Lord,
To lift myself to thee with hands of toil,
Climbing the slippery cliff of unheard prayer!
Lift up a hand among my idle days--
One beckoning finger. I will cast aside
The clogs of earthly circumstance, and run
Up the broad highways where the countless worlds
Sit ripening in the summer of thy love.'

Breathless for fear of losing a word, Robert yet rememb