ed
page--this beam of insight, or of inspiration!

Alas! one result of its coming was that it encouraged delay. If he set
hand to the page, the firm halo, here a moment since, was gone, had
flitted capriciously to the wall; passed next through the window, to
the wall of the garden; was dancing back in another moment upon the
innermost walls of one's own miserable brain, to swell there--that
astounding white light!--rising steadily in the cup, the mental
receptacle, till it overflowed, and he lay faint and drowning in it. Or
he rose above it, as above a great liquid surface, and hung giddily
over it--light, [165] simple, and absolute--ere he fell. Or there was
a battle between light and darkness around him, with no way of escape
from the baffling strokes, the lightning flashes; flashes of blindness
one might rather call them. In truth, the intuitions of the night (for
they worked still, or tried to work, by night) became the sickly
nightmares of the day, in which Prior Saint-Jean slept, or tried to
sleep, or lay sometimes in a trance without food for many hours, from
which he would spring up suddenly to crowd, against time, as much as he
could into his book with pen or brush; winged flowers, or stars with
human limbs and faces, still intruding themselves, or mere notes of
light and darkness from the actual horizon. There it all is still in
the faded gold and colours of the ancient volume--"Prior Saint-Jean's
folly":--till on a sudden the hand collapses, as he becomes aware of
that real, prosaic, broad daylight lying harsh upon the page, making
his delicately toned auroras seem but a patch of grey, and himself for
a moment, with a sigh of disgust, of self-reproach, to be his old
unimpassioned monastic self once more.

The boy, for his part, was grown at last full of misgiving. He ponders
how he may get the Prior away, or escape by himself, find his way back
to the convent and report his master's condition, his strange loss of
memory for names and the like, his illusions about himself and [166]
others. And he is more than ever distrustful now of his late beloved
playmate, who quietly obstructs any movement of the kind, and has
undertaken, at the Prior's entreaty, to draw down the moon from the
sky, for some shameful price, known to the magicians of that day.

Yet Apollyon, at all events, would still play as gaily as ever on
occasion. Hitherto they had played as young animals do; without
playthings namely, applyin