ercome with wonder and awe. She followed him in
his progress. Here, the twilight was the very essence of life,
the coloured darkness was the embryo of all light, and the day.
Here, the very first dawn was breaking, the very last sunset
sinking, and the immemorial darkness, whereof life's day would
blossom and fall away again, re-echoed peace and profound
immemorial silence.

Away from time, always outside of time! Between east and
west, between dawn and sunset, the church lay like a seed in
silence, dark before germination, silenced after death.
Containing birth and death, potential with all the noise and
transition of life, the cathedral remained hushed, a great,
involved seed, whereof the flower would be radiant life
inconceivable, but whose beginning and whose end were the circle
of silence. Spanned round with the rainbow, the jewelled gloom
folded music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon
death, as a seed folds leaf upon leaf and silence upon the root
and the flower, hushing up the secret of all between its parts,
the death out of which it fell, the life into which it has
dropped, the immortality it involves, and the death it will
embrace again.

Here in the church, "before" and "after" were folded
together, all was contained in oneness. Brangwen came to his
consummation. Out of the doors of the womb he had come, putting
aside the wings of the womb, and proceeding into the light.
Through daylight and day-after-day he had come, knowledge after
knowledge, and experience after experience, remembering the
darkness of the womb, having prescience of the darkness after
death. Then between--while he had pushed open the doors of
the cathedral, and entered the twilight of both darkness, the
hush of the two-fold silence where dawn was sunset, and the
beginning and the end were one.

Here the stone leapt up from the plain of earth, leapt up in
a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the
horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range
of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the
ecstasy, the touch, to the meeting and the consummation, the
meeting, the clasp, the close embrace, the neutrality, the
perfect, swooning consummation, the timeless ecstasy. There his
soul remained, at the apex of the arch, clinched in the timeless
ecstasy, consummated.

And there was no time nor life nor death, but only this, this
timeless consummation, where the thrust from earth met