ILLUMINATION AS EXPRESSED IN THE POETICAL TEMPERAMENT
Poetry is the natural language of cosmic consciousness. "The music of the
spheres" is a literal expression, as all who have ever _glimpsed_ the
beauties of the spiritual realms will testify.
"Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle. Poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world," said Shelley.
Not that all poets are aware, in their mortal consciousness, of their
divine mission, or of their spiritual glimpses.
The outer mind, the mortal or carnal mind--that part of our organism whose
office it is to take care of the physical body, for its preservation and
its well-being, may be so dominant as, to hold in bondage the _atman_, but
it can not utterly silence its voice.
Thus the true poet is also a seer; a prophet; a spiritually-conscious
being, for such time, or during such phases of inspiration, as he becomes
imbued with the spirit of poetry.
A person who writes rhymes is not necessarily a poet. So, too, there are
poets who do not express their inspirations according to the rules of metre
and syntax.
Between that which Balzac tabulated as the "abstractive" type of human
evolvement and that which is fully cosmic in consciousness, there are many
and diverse degrees of the higher faculties; but the poet always expresses
some one of these degrees of the higher consciousness; indeed some poets
are of that versatile nature that they run the entire gamut of the
emotional nature, now descending to the ordinary normal consciousness which
takes account only of the personal self; again ascending to the heights of
the impersonal fearlessness and unassailable confidence that is the
heritage of those who have reached the full stature of the "man-god whom we
await"--the cosmic conscious race that is to be.
All commentators upon modern instances of Illumination unite in regarding
Walt Whitman as one of the most, if not _the most_, perfect example of whom
we have any record of cosmic consciousness and its sublime effects upon the
character and personality of the illumined one.
Whitman is a sublime type for reasons which are of first importance in
their relation to character as viewed from the ideals of the cosmic
conscious race-to-be.
Moralists have criticized Whitman as immoral; religionists have deplored
his lack of a religious creed; literary critics have denied his claim to
high rank in the world of literature; but Walt Whitman is unquestionably
without a peer in the roundness of his genius; in the simplicity of his
soul; in the catholicity of his sympathy; in the perfect poise and
self-control and imperturbability of his kindness. His biographers agree as
to his never-failing good nature. He was without any of those fits of
unrest and temperamental eccentricities which are supposed to be the "sign
manual" of the child of the poetic muse.
In Whitman it would seem that all those petty prejudices against any
nationality or class of men, were entirely absent. He exalted the
common-place, not as a pose, nor because he had given himself to that task,
but because to him there was no common-place. In the cosmic perception of
the universe, everything is exalted to the plane of _fitness_. As to the
pure all things are pure, so to the one who is steeped in the sublimity
of Divine Illumination, there is no high or low, no good or bad, no white
or black, or rich or poor; all--all is a part of the plan, and, in its
place in cosmic evolution, it _fits_.
Whitman cries:
"All! all! Let others ignore what they may, I make the poem of evil also, I
commemorate that part also; I am myself just as much evil as good, and my
nation is, and I say there, is in fact no evil."
Compared to the religious aspect of cosmic consciousness in which, previous
to the time of Illumination, the devotee had striven to rise to spiritual
heights through disdaining the flesh, this note of Whitman's is a new
note--the nothingness of evil as such; the righteousness of the flesh and
the holiness of earthly, or human, love, bespeaks the prophet of the New
Dispensation; the time hinted of by Jesus, the Master, when he said, "when
the twain shall be one and the outside as the inside," as a sign and symbol
of the blessed time to come when the kingdom he spoke of (not his personal
kingdom, but the kingdom which he represented, the kingdom of Love), should
come upon earth.
Whitman's illumination is essentially poetic; not that it is not also
intellectual and moral; but after his experience--at least an experience
more notable than any hitherto recorded by him, in or about his
thirty-fifth year--we find his conversation invariably reflecting the
beauty and poetical imagery of his mind. He may be said to have lived and
moved and had his being in a state of blissful unconsciousness of anything
unclean or impure, or unnatural.
This absence of _consciousness of evil_ is in no wise synonymous with a
type of person who _exalts_ his undeveloped animal tendencies under the
guise of liberation from a sense of sin. Neither is this discrimination
easy of attainment to any but those who _realize_ in their own hearts the
very distinct difference between the nothingness of sin and the pretended
acceptance of perversions as purity.
While we are on this point we must again emphasize the truth that cosmic
consciousness cannot be gained by prescription; there is no royal road to
_mukti_. Liberation from the lower _manas_ can not be bought or sold, it
can not be explained or comprehended, save by those to whom the attainment
of such a state is at least _possible_ if not _probable_.
Illustrative of his sense of unity with all life (one of the most salient
characteristics of the fully cosmic conscious man), are these lines of
Whitman's:
"Voyaging to every port, to dicker and adventure;
Hurrying with the modern crowd, as eager and fickle as any;
Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him;
Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long
while;
Walking the hills of Judea, with the beautiful gentle God by my side;
Speeding through space--speeding through Heaven and the stars."
Oriental mysticism tells us that one of the attributes of the liberated one
is the power to read the hearts and souls of all men; to feel what they
feel; and to so unite with them in consciousness that we _are_ for the time
being the very person or thing we contemplate. If this be indeed the test
of godhood, Whitman expresses it in every line:
"The disdain and calmness of olden martyrs;
The mother condemned for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children
gazing on;
The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing,
covered with sweat;
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck--the murderous
buckshot and the bullets;
All these I feel, or am."
Seeking to express the sense of knowing and especially of _feeling_, and
the bigness and broadness of life, the scorn of petty aims and strife; in
short, that interior perception which Illumination brings, he says:
"Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? have you reckoned the earth
much?
Have you practised so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all
poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun--there are millions of
suns left;
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through
the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books;
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me;
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself.
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and
the end;
But I do not talk of the beginning nor the end.
* * * * *
"There was never any more inception than there is now;
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now."
A perception of eternity as an ever-present reality is one of the
characteristic signs of the inception of the new birth.
Birth and death become nothing more nor yet less, than events in the
procedure of eternal life; age becomes merely a graduation garment; God
and heaven are not separated from us by any reality; they become every-day
facts.
Whitman tells of the annihilation of any sense of separateness from his
soul side, in the following words:
"Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my
soul."
He did not confound his mortal consciousness, the lower _manas_, with the
higher--the soul; neither did he recognize an impassable gulf between them.
While admittedly ascending to the higher consciousness from the lower,
Whitman refused to follow the example of the saints and sages of old, and
mortify or despise the lower self--the manifestation. He had indeed _struck
the balance_; he recognized his dual nature, each in its rightful place and
with its rightful possessions, and refused to abase either "I am" to the
other. He literally "rendered unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's," by
claiming for the flesh the purity and the cleanliness of God's handiwork.
In Whitman, too, we find an almost perfect realization of immortality and
of blissfulness of life and the complete harmony and unity of his soul with
_all there is_. Following closely upon the experience that seems to have
been the most vivid of the many instances of illumination which he enjoyed
throughout a long life, he wrote the following lines, indicative of the
emotions immediately associated with the influx of illumination:
"Swiftly arose and spread around me, the peace and joy and knowledge that
pass all the art and argument of earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the elder hand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my
sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of creation is love."
In lines written in 1860, about seven years after the first vivid instance
of the experience of illumination which afterward became oft-recurrent,
Whitman speaks of what he calls "Perfections," and from what he writes we
may assume that he referred to those possessing cosmic consciousness, and
the practical impossibility of describing this peculiarity and accounting
for the alteration it makes in character and outlook.
Says Whitman:
"Only themselves understand themselves, and the like of themselves,
As souls only understand souls."
It has been pointed out that Whitman more perfectly illustrates the type of
the coming man--the cosmic conscious race, because Whitman's illumination
seems to have come without the terrible agonies of doubt and prayer and
mortification of the flesh, which characterize so many of those saints and
sages of whom we read in sacred literature. But it must not be inferred
from this that Whitman's life was devoid of suffering.
A biographer says of him:
"He has loved the earth, sun, animals; despised riches, given alms to every
one that asked; stood up for the stupid and crazy; devoted his income and
labor to others; according to the command of the divine voice; and was
impelled by the divine impulse; and now for reward he is poor, despised,
sick, paralyzed, neglected, dying. His message to men, to the delivery of
which he devoted his life, which has been dearer in his eyes (for man's
sake) than wife, children, life itself, is unread, or scoffed and jeered
at. What shall he say to God? He says that God knows him through and
through, and that he is willing to leave himself in God's hands."
But above and beyond all this, is the sense of oneness with all who suffer
which is ever a heritage of the cosmic conscious one, even while he is, at
the same time, the recipient of states of bliss and certainty of
immortality, and melting soul-love, incomprehensible and indescribable to
the non-initiate. Whitman's calm and poise was not that of the
ice-encrusted egotist. It is the poise of the perfectly balanced man-god
equally aware of his human and his divine attributes; and justly estimating
both; nor drawing too fine a line between.
"I embody all presence outlawed or suffering;
See myself in prison, shaped like another man,
And feel the dull unintermitted pain.
* * * * *
"For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch;
It is I left out in the morning, and barr'd at night.
Not a mutineer walks handcuffed to jail, but I am handcuffed and walk by
his side;
* * * * *
"Not a youngster is taken for larceny, but I go up too, and am tried and
sentenced.
Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last
gasp;
My face is ash-colored--my sinews gnarl--away from me people retreat.
* * * * *
"Askers embody themselves in me, and I am embodied in them;
I project my hat, sit shame-faced and beg."
If any one imagines that Whitman was not a religious man, let him read the
following:
"I say that no man has ever yet been half devout enough;
None has ever yet adored or worshipped half enough;
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the
future is."
There is a sublime confidence and worship in these words which belittles
the churchman's hope and prayer that God may be good to him and bless him
with a future life. Whitman's philosophy, less specific as to method, is
assuredly more certain, more faithful in effect. Whitman had the experience
of being immersed in a sea of light and love, so frequently a phenomenon
of Illumination; he retained throughout all his life a complete and perfect
assurance of immortality.
His sense of union with and relationship to all living things was as much a
part of him as the color of his eyes and hair; he did not have to remind
himself of it, as a religious duty.
He experienced a keen joy in nature and in the innocent, childlike
pleasures of everyday things, and at the same time possessed a splendid
intellect.
All consciousness of sin or evil had been erased from his mind and actually
had no place in his life.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
In the case of Lord Tennyson, we have a definite recognition of two
distinct states of consciousness, finally culminating in a clear experience
of cosmic consciousness; this experience was so positive as to leave no
doubt or indecision in his mind regarding the reality of the spiritual, and
the illusory character of the external life.
In truth Tennyson had so fixed his consciousness in the spiritual rather
than in the external, that he looked out from that inner self, as through
the windows of a house; he was prepared, as he said, to believe that his
body was but an imaginary symbol of himself, but nothing and no one could
persuade him that the real Tennyson, the _I am_ consciousness of being
which was he, was other than spiritual, eternal, undying.
Like so many others, notably Whitman, who have realized a more or less full
degree of cosmic consciousness, Tennyson was deeply and reverently
religious, although not partisanly connected with church work. Tennyson's
early boyhood was marked by experiences which usually befall persons of the
psychic temperament. As he himself described these states of consciousness,
they were moments in which the ego transcended the limits of self
consciousness and entered the limitless realm of spirit.
They do not tabulate with the ordinary trance condition of the
spiritualistic medium, who subjects his own self consciousness to a
"control," although Tennyson always believed that the best of his writings
were inspired by, and written under "the direct influence of higher
intelligences, of whose presence he was distinctly conscious. He felt them
near him and his mind was impressed by their ideas."
The point which we emphasize is that these peculiar states of consciousness
are not synonymous with the western idea of trance as seen in mediumship,
although Tennyson uses the term "trance" in describing them.
He says:
"A kind of walking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood,
when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating
my own name to myself silently until all at once, as it were, out of the
intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself
seemed to dissolve and fade into boundless being."
It is a fact that children of a peculiarly sensitive or psychic temperament
seem to have strange ideas regarding the name by which they are called, and
not infrequently become confused and filled with an inexplicable wonderment
at the sound of their own name. This phenomenon is much less rare than is
generally known.
In Tennyson's "Ancient Sage" this experience of entering into cosmic
consciousness is thus described:
"More than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself,
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And passed into the nameless, as a cloud
Melts into heaven. I touched my limbs; the limbs
Were strange, not mine; and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of self
The gain of such large life as matched with ours
Were sun to spark--unshadowable in words.
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world."
Tennyson's illumination is certain, clearly defined, distinct and
characteristic, although his poems are much less cosmic than those of
Whitman and of many others. There is, however, in the above, all that is
descriptive of that state of consciousness which accompanies liberation
from the illusion--the _enchantment_ of the merely mortal existence.
Words are, as Tennyson fitly says, but "shadows of a shadow-world"; how
then may we hope to define in terms comprehensible to sense-consciousness
only, emotions and experiences which involve loss of _self_, and at the
same time gain of the _Self_?
Tennyson's frequent excursions into the realm of spiritual consciousness
while still a child, bears out our contention that many children not
infrequently have this experience, and either through reserve or from lack
of ability to explain it, keep the matter to themselves; generally losing
or "outgrowing" the tendency as they enter the activities of school life,
and the mortal mind becomes dominant in them. This is especially true of
the rising generation, and we personally know several clearly defined
instances which have been reported to us, during conversations upon the
theme of cosmic consciousness.
YONE NOGUCHI
Any one who has ever had the good fortune to read a little book of verse
entitled "From the Eastern Seas," by Yone Noguchi, a young Japanese, will
at once pronounce them a beautiful and perhaps perfect example of verse
that may be correctly labeled "cosmic."
Noguchi was under nineteen years of age when he penned these verses, but
they are thoughts and expressions possible only to one who lives the
greater part of his life within the illumination of the cosmic sense. They
are so delicate as to have little, if any, of the mortal in them.
It is also significant that Noguchi in these later years (he is now only a
little past thirty), does not reproduce this cosmic atmosphere in his
writings to such an extent, due no doubt to the fact that his daily
occupation (that of Professor of Languages in the Imperial College of
Tokio), compels his outer attention, excluding the fullness of the inner
vision.
The following lines, are perfect as an exposition of spiritual
consciousness in which the lesser self has become submerged:
"Underneath the shade of the trees, myself passed into somewhere as a
cloud.
I see my soul floating upon the face of the deep, nay the faceless face
of the deepless deep--
Ah, the seas of loneliness.
The silence-waving waters, ever shoreless, bottomless, colorless, have no
shadow of my passing soul.
I, without wisdom, without foolishness, without goodness, without
badness--am like God, a negative god at least."
The almost perpetual state of spiritual consciousness in which the young
poet lived at this time is apparent in the following lines:
"When I am lost in the deep body of the mist on a hill,
The universe seems built with me as its pillar.
Am I the god upon the face of the deep, nay--
The deepless deepness in the beginning?"
And the following, possible of comprehension only to one who has glimpsed
the eternal verity of man's spiritual reality, and the shadow-like quality
of the external; could have been written only by one freed from the bonds
of illusion:
"The mystic silence of the moon,
Gradually revived in me immortality;
The sorrow that gently stirred
Was melancholy-sweet; sorrow is higher
Far than joy, the sweetest sorrow is supreme
Amid all the passions. I had
No sorrow of mortal heart: my sorrow
Was one given before the human sorrows
Were given me. Mortal speech died
From me: my speech was one spoken before
God bestowed on me human speech.
There is nothing like the moon-night
When I, parted from the voice of the city,
Drink deep of Infinity with peace
From another, a stranger sphere. There is nothing
Like the moon-night when the rich, noble stars
And maiden roses interchange their long looks of love.
When I raise my face from the land of loss
Unto the golden air, and calmly learn
How perfect it is to grow still as a star.
There is nothing like the moon-night
When I walk upon the freshest dews,
And amid the warmest breezes,
With all the thought of God
And all the bliss of man, as Adam
Not yet driven from Eden, and to whom
Eve was not yet born. What a bird
Dreams in the moonlight is my dream:
What a rose sings is my song."
The true poet does not need individual experiences of either sorrow or of
joy. His spirit is so attuned to the song of the universe; so sympathetic
with the moans of earthly trials, that every vibration from the heart of
the universe reaches him; stabs him with its sorrow, or irradiates his
being with joy.
Jesus is fitly portrayed to us as "The Man of Sorrows"; even while we
recognize him as a self-conscious son of God--an immortal being fully aware
of his escape from enchantment, and his heirship to Paradise.
Cosmic consciousness bestows a bliss that is past all words to describe and
it also quickens the sympathies and attunes the soul to the vibrations of
the heart-cries of the struggling evolving ones who are still travailing in
the pains of the new birth. We must be willing to endure the suffering _in
order that we may realize_ the joy; not because joy is the reward for
suffering, but because it is only by losing sight of the personal self that
we become aware of that inner Self which is immortal and blissful; and when
we become aware of the reality of that inner Self, we know that we are
united with _the all_, and must feel with all.
It would be impossible in one volume to enumerate all the poets who have
given evidence of supra-consciousness. As has been previously pointed out,
all true poets are at least temporarily aware of their dual nature--rather,
one should say, the dual phases of their consciousness. Many, perhaps, do
not function beyond the higher planes of the psychic vibrations, but even
these are aware of the reality of the soul, and the illusion of the
sense-conscious, mortal life.
Dante; the Brownings; Shelley; Swinbourne; Goethe; Milton; Keats; Rosetti;
Shakespeare; Pope; Lowell--where should we stop, did we essay to draw a
line?
WORDSWORTH
Wordsworth, the poet of Nature has given us in his own words, so clearly
cut an outline of his Illumination, that we can not resist recording here
the salient points which mark his experience as that of cosmic
consciousness, transcending the more frequent phenomenon of
soul-consciousness and its psychic functions.
Wordsworth's Ode to immortality epitomizes the lesson of the Yoga
sutras--out of The Absolute we come, and return to immortal bliss with
consciousness added. Wordsworth also affords an excellent example of our
contention that cosmic consciousness does not come to us at any specific
age or time. Wordsworth distinctly says that as a child he possessed this
faculty, as for example his oft-repeated words, both in conversation and in
his biography:
"Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of
death, as a state applicable to my own being. It was not so much from
feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty came, as from a sense of the
indomitableness of the spirit within me. I used to brood over the stories
of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself that, whatever might
become of others, I should be translated, in something of the same way, to
heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of
external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that
I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial
nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree,
to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality."
In later life, Wordsworth lost the realization of this supra-consciousness,
in what a commentator calls a "fever of rationalism"; but the power of that
wonderful spiritual vision, pronounced in his youth, could not be utterly
lost and soon after he reached his thirtieth year, he again becomes the
spiritual poet, fully conscious of his higher nature--the cosmic conscious
self.
WILLIAM SHARP--"FIONA MACLEOD"
A pronounced instance of the two phases of consciousness, is that of the
late William Sharp, one of the best known writers of the modern English
school.
It was not until after the death of William Sharp, that the secret of this
dual personality was given to the public, although a few of his most
intimates had known it for several years. In the "Memoirs" compiled by
Elizabeth Sharp, wife of the writer, we find the following:
"The life of William Sharp divides itself naturally into two halves: the
first ends with the publication by William Sharp of 'Vistas,' and the
second begins with 'Pharais,' the first book signed _Fiona Macleod_."
In these memoirs, the point is made obvious that _Fiona Macleod_ is not
merely a _nom de plume_; neither is she an obsessing personality; a guide
or "control," as the Spiritualists know that phenomenon. _Fiona Macleod_,
always referred to by William Sharp as "she," is his own higher Self--the
cosmic consciousness of the spiritual man which was so nearly balanced in
the personality of William Sharp as to _appear_ to the casual observer as
another person.
It is said that the identity of _Fiona Macleod_, as expressed in the
manuscript put out under that name, was seldom suspected to be that of
William Sharp, so different was the style and the tone of the work of these
two phases of the same personality.
In this connection it may be well to quote his wife's opinion regarding the
two phases of personality, answering the belief of Yeats the Irish poet
that he believed William Sharp to be the most extraordinary psychic he
ever encountered and saying that _Fiona Macleod_ was evidently a distinct
personality. In the Memoirs, Mrs. Sharp comments upon this and says:
"It is true, as I have said, that William Sharp seemed a different person
when the Fiona mood was on him; but that he had no recollection of what he
said in that mood was not the case--the psychic visionary power belonged
exclusively to neither; it influenced both and was dictated by laws he did
not understand."
Mrs. Sharp refers to William Sharp and Fiona, as two persons, saying that
"it influenced both," but both sides of his personality rather than both
personalities, is what she claims. In further explanation she writes:
"I remember from early days how he would speak of the momentary curious
'dazzle in the brain,' which preceded the falling away of all material
things and precluded some inner vision of great beauty, or great presences,
or some symbolic import--that would pass as rapidly as it came. I have been
beside him when he has been in trance and I have felt the room throb with
heightened vibration."
One of the "dream-visions" which William Sharp experienced shortly before
his last illness, is headed "Elemental Symbolism," and was recorded by him
in these beautiful words:
"I saw Self, or Life, symbolized all about me as a limitless, fathomless
and lonely sea. I took a handful and threw it into the grey silence of
ocean air, and it returned at once as a swift and potent flame, a red fire
crested with brown sunrise, rushing from between the lips of sky and sea to
the sound as of innumerable trumpets."
"In another dream he visited a land where there was no more war, where all
men and women were equal; where humans, birds and beasts were no longer at
enmity, or preyed on one another. And he was told that the young men of the
land had to serve two years as missionaries to those who lived at the
uttermost boundaries. 'To what end?' he asked. 'To cast out fear, our last
enemy.' In the house of his host he was struck by the beauty of a framed
painting that seemed to vibrate with rich colors. 'Who painted that?' he
asked. His host smiled, 'We have long since ceased to use brushes and
paints. That is a thought projected from the artist's brain, and its
duration will be proportionate with its truth.'"
In explanation of why he chose to put out so much of the creative work of
his brain under the signature of a woman, and how he happened to use the
name _Fiona Macleod_, Sharp explained that when he began to realize how
strong was the feminine element in the book _Pharais_, he decided to issue
the book under a woman's name and _Fiona Macleod_ "flashed ready-made" into
his mind. "My truest self, the self who is below all other selves must find
expression," he explained. The Self that is _above_ the other self is what
he should have said. The following extracts are from the _Fiona Macleod_
phase of William Sharp and are characteristic of the Self, as evidenced in
all instances of Illumination, particularly as these expressions refer to
the nothingness of death, and the beauty and power of Love. "Do not speak
of the spiritual life as 'another life'; there is no 'other life'; what we
mean by that, is with us now. The great misconception of death is that it
is the only door to another world." This testimony corroborates that of
Whitman as well as of St. Paul, notwithstanding all the centuries that
separate the two. St. Paul did not say that man _will have_ a spiritual
body, but that he _has_ a spiritual body as well as a corporeal body.
After the experience of his illumination, William Sharp, writing as _Fiona
Macleod_ constantly testified to the ever-present reality of his spiritual
life; a life far more real to him than the sense-conscious life although he
alluded to it as his dream. In one place he says:
"Now truly, is dreamland no longer a phantasy of sleep, but a loveliness so
great that, like deep music, there could be no words wherewith to measure
it, but only the breathless unspoken speech of the soul upon whom has
fallen the secret dews."
Of the impossibility of adequately explaining the mystery of Illumination
and the sensations it inspires, he says, speaking through the Self of
_Fiona Macleod_: "I write, not because I know a mystery, and would reveal
it, but because I have known a mystery and am to-day as a child before it,
and can neither reveal nor interpret it."
This is comparable with Whitman's "when I try to describe the best, I can
not. My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots."
Another sentence from _Fiona_:
"There is a great serenity in the thought of death, when it is known to be
the gate of Life."
Like all who have gained the Great Blessing, the revelation to the mind of
that higher Self, that _we are_, William Sharp suffered keenly. The despair
of the world was his, co-equal with the Joy of the Spirit. Indeed, his is
at once the gift and the burden of the Illuminati.
Mrs. Mona Caird said of him: "He was almost encumbered by the infinity of
his perceptions; by the thronging interests, intuitions, glimpses of
wonders, beauties, and mysteries which made life for him a pageant and a
splendor such as is only disclosed to the soul that has to bear the torment
and revelations of genius."
The burden of the world's sorrow; the longings and aspirations of the soul
that has glimpsed, or that has more fully cognized the realms of the Spirit
which are its rightful home; are ever a part of the price of liberation.
The illumined mind sees and hears and feels the vibrations that emanate
from all who are travailing in the meshes of the sense-conscious life; but
through all the sympathetic sorrow, there runs the thread of a divine
assurance and certainty of profound joy--a bliss that passes comprehension
or description.
Mrs. Sharp, in the final conclusion of the _Memoirs_ says "to quote my
husband's own words--ever below all the stress and failure, below all the
triumph of his toil, lay the _beauty of his dream_."
In accordance with an oft-repeated request, these lines are inscribed on
the Iona cross carved in lava, which marks the grave wherein is laid to
rest the earthly form of William Sharp:
"Farewell to the known and exhausted,
Welcome the unknown and illimitable."
And this:
"Love is more great than we conceive, and death is the keeper of unknown
redemptions."
They are from his higher Self; from the illumined "Dominion of Dreams."