[Decoration]
THE moon had not yet risen; but the vast of the night was all seething
with stars, and bridged by a Milky Way of extraordinary brightness.
There was no wind; but the sea, far as sight could reach, was running in
ripples of fire,--a vision of infernal beauty. Only the ripplings were
radiant (between them was blackness absolute);--and the luminosity was
amazing. Most of the undulations were yellow like candle-flame; but
there were crimson lampings also,--and azure, and orange, and emerald.
And the sinuous flickering of all seemed, not a pulsing of many waters,
but a laboring of many wills,--a fleeting conscious and monstrous,--a
writhing and a swarming incalculable, as of dragon-life in some depth of
Erebus.
And life indeed was making the sinister splendor of that spectacle--but
life infinitesimal, and of ghostliest delicacy,--life illimitable, yet
ephemeral, flaming and fading in ceaseless alternation over the whole
round of waters even to the sky-line, above which, in the vaster abyss,
other countless lights were throbbing with other spectral colors.
* * * * *
Watching, I wondered and I dreamed. I thought of the Ultimate Ghost
revealed in that scintillation tremendous of Night and Sea;--quickening
above me, in systems aglow with awful fusion of the past dissolved, with
vapor of the life again to be;--quickening also beneath me, in
meteor-gushings and constellations and nebulosities of colder
fire,--till I found myself doubting whether the million ages of the
sun-star could really signify, in the flux of perpetual dissolution,
anything more than the momentary sparkle of one expiring noctiluca.
Even with the doubt, the vision changed. I saw no longer the sea of the
ancient East, with its shudderings of fire, but that Flood whose width
and depth and altitude are one with the Night of Eternity,--the
shoreless and timeless Sea of Death and Birth. And the luminous haze of
a hundred millions of suns,--the Arch of the Milky Way,--was a single
smouldering surge in the flow of the Infinite Tides.
* * * * *
Yet again there came a change. I saw no more that vapory surge of suns;
but the living darkness streamed and thrilled about me with infinite
sparkling; and every sparkle was beating like a heart,--beating out
colors like the tints of the sea-fires. And the lampings of all
continually flowed away, as shivering threads of radiance, into
illimitable Mystery....
Then I knew myself also a phosphor-point,--one fugitive floating sparkle
of the measureless current;--and I saw that the light which was mine
shifted tint with each changing of thought. Ruby it sometimes shone, and
sometimes sapphire: now it was flame of topaz; again, it was fire of
emerald. And the meaning of the changes I could not fully know. But
thoughts of the earthly life seemed to make the light burn red; while
thoughts of supernal being,--of ghostly beauty and of ghostly
bliss,--seemed to kindle ineffable rhythms of azure and of violet.
* * * * *
But of white lights there were none in all the Visible. And I
marvelled.