Vi.--Reading A Book, Under The Cliff

These clever young men! She is reading a poem of the wind.[262:1] The singer asks what the wind wants of him--so instant does it seem in its appeal.

"'Art thou a dumb wronged thing that would be righted, Entrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear! No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith requited With falsehood--love, at last aware Of scorn--hopes, early blighted--

'We have them; but I know not any tone So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow; Dost think men would go mad without a moan, If they knew any way to borrow A pathos like thine own?'"

The splendid lines assail her.[263:1] In her anguish of response she turns from them at last--they are too much. This power of perception is almost a baseness! And bitterly resentful of the young diviner who can thus show forth her inmost woe with his phrase of "love, at last aware of scorn," she flings the volume from her--rejecting him, detesting him, and finding ultimately through her stung sense the way to refute him who has dared, with his mere boy's eyes, to discern such anguish. He is wrong: the wind does not mean what he fancies by its moaning. He thus interprets it, because he thinks only of himself, and of how the suffering of others--failure, mistake, disgrace, relinquishment--is but the example for his use, the help to his path untried! Such agonies as her own are mere instances for him to recognise and put into a phrase--like that one, which stings the spirit, and sets the heart to woe-fullest aching, and brims the eyes with bitter, bitterest tears. How dare he, with his crude boy's heart, embody grief like hers in words, how dare he know--and now her irony turns cruel:

"Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest! Himself the undefeated that shall be: Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test-- His triumph in eternity Too plainly manifest!"

Of course he does not know! The wind means something else. And as the pain grows fainter, she finds it easier to forgive him. How could "the happy, prompt instinctive way of youth" discover the wind's secret? Only "the kind, calm years, exacting their accompt of pain" can mature the mind. This young poet, grown older, will learn the truth one day--on a midsummer morning, at daybreak, looking over some "sparkling foreign country," at its height of gloom and gloss. At its height--next minute must begin, then, the work of destruction; and what shall be the earliest sign? That very wind beginning among the vines:

"So low, so low, what shall it say but this? 'Here is the change beginning, here the lines Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss The limit time assigns.'" . . .

Change is the law of life: that is what the wind says.

"Nothing can be as it has been before; Better, so call it, only not the same. To draw one beauty into our hearts' core, And keep it changeless! Such our claim; So answered: Never more!

Simple? Why, this is the old woe of the world; Tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die. Rise with it then! Rejoice that man is hurled From change to change unceasingly, His soul's wings never furled!"

* * * * *

Her rejection of the "young man's pride" has raised her for an instant above her own suffering. Flinging back his interpretation in his face--that interpretation which had pierced her to the quick with its intensity of vision--she has found a better one; and for a while she rests in this. "The laws of nature": shall not that be the formula to still her pain? . . . Not yet, not yet; the heart was numbed but for a moment. Stung to such fresh life as it has been but now, it cries imperiously again. The laws of nature?

"That's a new question; still replies the fact, Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so; We moan in acquiescence."

Only to acquiescence can we attain.

"God knows: endure his act!"

But the human loss, the human anguish. . . . Formulas touch not these, nor does acquiescence mitigate. Tell ourselves as wisely as we may that mutability must be--we yet discern where the woe lies. We cannot fix the "one fair good wise thing" just as we grasped it--cannot engrave it, as it were, on our souls. And then we die--and it is gone for ever, and we would have sunk beneath death's wave, as we sink now, to save it--but time washed over it ere death mercifully came. It was abolished even while we lived: the wind had begun "so low, so low" . . . and carried it away on its moaning voice. Change is the very essence of life; and life may be probation for a better life--who knows? But if she could have engraved, immutable, on her soul, the hours in which her husband loved her. . . .