ounterpart
Of that I had been--the raptorial jaws,
The arms that wont to crush with strength alone,
The eyes that glared vindictive.--Fallen there,
Vast wings upheaved me; from the Alpine peaks
Whose avalanches swirl the valley mists
And whelm the helpless cottage, to the crown
Of Chimborazo, on whose changeless jewels
The torrid rays recoil, with ne'er a cloud
To swathe their blistered steps, I rested not,
But preyed on all that ventured from the earth,
An outlaw of the heavens.--But evermore
Must death release me to the jungle shades;
And there like Samson's grew my locks again
In the old walks and ways, till scapeless fate
Won me as ever to the haunts of men,
Luring my lives with battle and with love." . . .

I quote less than a quarter of the poem, of which the rest is just as
good, and I ask: Who of us all handles his English vocabulary better
than Mr. Blood?[7]

His proclamations of the mystic insight have a similar verbal power:--

"There is an invariable and reliable condition (or uncondition) ensuing
about the instant of recall from anaesthetic stupor to 'coming to,' in
which the genius of being is revealed. . . . No words may express the
imposing certainty of the patient that he is realizing the primordial
Adamic surprise of Life.

"Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it
could not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal
consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its occurrence,
and to try to formulate its baffling import,--with but this consolatory
afterthought: that he has known the oldest truth, and that he has done
with human theories as to the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race.
He is beyond instruction in 'spiritual things.' . . .

"It is the instant contrast of this 'tasteless water of souls' with
formal thought as we 'come to,' that leaves in the patient an
astonishment that the awful mystery of Life is at last but a homely and
a common thing, and that aside from mere formality the majestic and the
absurd are of equal dignity. The astonishment is aggravated as at a
thing of course, missed by sanity in overstepping, as in too foreign a
search, or with too eager an attention: as in finding one's spectacles
on one's nose, or in making in the dark a step higher than the stair.
My first experiences of this revelation had many varieties of emotion;
but as a man grows calm and determined by experience in gen