in its units and clamant in its silence. It was as a man might see the
wall of his room roll away, beyond which he had thought only the night
to lie, and discern a thronging mass of faces crying for help, pressing
upon him, urging, yet all without sound or word. He attempts in his
diary to use phrases for all this--he speaks of a pit in which is no
water, of shadows and forms that writhe and plead, of a light of glass
mingled with fire; and yet of an inevitability, of a Justice which there
is no questioning and a Force that there is no resisting. And, on the
other side, there was this help given by men of flesh and blood like
himself--using ceremonies and gestures and strange resonant words....
The whole was as some enormous orchestra--there was the wail on this
side, the answer on that--the throb of beating hearts--there were
climaxes, catastrophes, soft passages, and yet the result was one vast
and harmonious whole.

It was the catafalque that seemed to him the veiled door to that other
world that so manifested itself--seen as he saw it in the light of the
yellow candles--it was as the awful portal of death itself; beneath that
heavy mantle lay not so much a Body of Humanity still in death, as a
Soul of Humanity alive beyond death, quick and yet motionless with pain.
And those figures that moved about it, with censor and aspersorium, were
as angels for tenderness and dignity and undoubted power. They were men
like himself, yet they were far more; and they, too, one day, like
himself, would pass beneath that pall and need the help of others that
should follow them....

* * * * *

Something of this is but a hint of what Frank experienced; it came and
went, no doubt, in gusts, yet all through he seems to have felt that
sense that here was a door into that great watching world beyond--that
here, in what is supposed by the world to be the narrow constraint of
religion, was a liberty and an outlook into realities such as the open
road and nature can but seldom give. But for my part, I can no more
follow him further than I can write down the passion of the lover and
the ecstasy of the musician. If these things could be said in words,
they would have been said long ago. But at least it was along this path
of perception that Frank went--a path that but continued the way along
which he had come with such sure swiftness ever since the moment he had
taken his sorrows and changed them from bitter