The other day I was walking towards Urbino, where I was to spend the
night, having crossed the Apennines from San Sepolcro, and had come to a
level place on the mountain-top near the journey's end. My friends were
in a carriage somewhere behind, on a road which was still ascending in
great loops, and I was alone amid a visionary, fantastic, impossible
scenery. It was sunset and the stormy clouds hung upon mountain after
mountain, and far off on one great summit a cloud darker than the rest
glimmered with lightning. Away south upon another mountain a mediaeval
tower, with no building near nor any sign of life, rose into the clouds.
I saw suddenly in the mind's eye an old man, erect and a little gaunt,
standing in the door of the tower, while about him broke a windy light.
He was the poet who had at last, because he had done so much for the
word's sake, come to share in the dignity of the saint. He had hidden
nothing of himself, but he had taken care of 'that dignity ... the
perfection of form ... this lofty and severe quality ... this virtue.'
And though he had but sought it for the word's sake, or for a woman's
praise, it had come at last into his body and his mind. Certainly as he
stood there he knew how from behind that laborious mood, that pose, that
genius, no flower of himself but all himself, looked out as from behind
a mask that other Who alone of all men, the country-people say, is not a
hair's breadth more nor less than six feet high. He has in his ears
well-instructed voices and seeming solid sights are before his eyes, and
not as we say of many a one, speaking in metaphor, but as this were
Delphi or Eleusis, and the substance and the voice come to him among his
memories which are of women's faces; for was it Columbanus or another
that wrote 'There is one among the birds that is perfect, and one
perfect among the fish'?