And so the Riddle resolves itself as Memory,--immeasurable Memory of all
bodily fitness for the ends of life: a Composite glorified, doubtless,
by some equally measureless inherited sense of all the vanished joys
ever associated with such fitness.
Infinite, may we not term it--this Composite? Aye, but not merely
because the multitudes of dead memories that make it are unspeakable.
Equally unspeakable the width and the depth of the range of them
throughout the enormity of Time.... O lover, how slender the beautiful
witch,--the ghost within the ghost of you! Yet the depth of that ghost
is the depth of the Nebulous Zone bespanning Night,--the luminous Shadow
that Egypt figured of old as Mother of the Sun and the Gods, curving
her long white woman’s-body over the world. As a vapor of phosphorus,
or wake of a ship in the night,--only so with naked eye can we behold
it. But pierced by vision telescopic, it is revealed as the further
side of the Ring of the Cosmos,--dim belt of millions of suns seemingly
massed together like the cells of a living body, yet so seeming only
by reason of their frightful remoteness. Even thus really separated
each from each in the awfulness of the Night of Time,--by silent
profundities of centuries,--by interspaces of thousands and of myriads
of years,--though collectively shaping to love’s desire but one dim soft
sweet phantom,--are those million-swarming memories that make for youth
its luminous dream of beauty.