* * * * *
What if, ’twixt skies
And prostrate earth, he should surprise
The imaged vapour, head to foot,
Surveying, motionless and mute,
Its work, ere, in a whirlwind rapt
It vanish up again?—So hapt
My chance. HE stood there. Like the smoke
Pillared o’er Sodom, when day broke,—
I saw him. One magnific pall
Mantled in massive fold and fall
His head, and coiled in snaky swathes
About his feet: night’s black, that bathes
All else, broke, grizzled with despair,
Against the soul of blackness there.
A gesture told the mood within—
That wrapped right hand which based the chin
That intense meditation fixed
On his procedure,—pity mixed
With the fulfilment of decree.
Motionless, thus, he spoke to me,
Who fell before his feet, a mass,
No man now.
Then follows the Sentence, excluding him from the heaven of spirit, and
leaving him to the world of sense, hopeless for ever of anything
higher—a sentence which seemed to him at first to be rather a reward
than a punishment, as he thought of “earth’s resources—vast exhaustless
beauty, endless change of wonder!” Even a fern-leaf a museum in itself!
The answer of the Voice to this shallow thought leads us into the very
loftiest regions of the imagination, suggesting views of the future of
the redeemed which make the soul thrill with eager expectancy—