l 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 enchantment of the heart! The night had been enchanted. In a dream
or vision he had known the ecstasy of seraphic life. Was it an instant
of enchantment 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 happened. The instant flashed forth like a point of
light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form
was veiling softly its afterglow. O! In the virgin womb of the
imagination the word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the
virgin's chamber. An afterglow deepened within his spirit, whence the
white flame had passed, deepening to a rose and ardent light. That rose
and ardent light was her strange wilful heart, strange that 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 enchanted days.

The verses passed from his mind to his lips and, murmuring them over,
he felt the rhythmic movement 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, consumed the hearts of men and
angels: the rays from the rose that was her wilful heart.

Your eyes have set man's heart 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 and beat.
And then? Smoke, incense ascending from the altar of the world.

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Smoke went up from the whole earth, from the vapoury oceans, smoke of
her praise. The earth was like a swinging swaying censer, a ball of
incense, an ellipsoidal fall. The rhythm died out at once; the cry of
his heart was broken. His lips began to murmur the first verses over
and over; then went on stumbling through half verses, stammering and
baffled; then stopped. The heart's cry was broken.

The veiled windless hour had passed and behind the panes of the naked
window th