Chapter XIX

What if, ’twixt skies And prostrate earth, he should surprise The imaged vapour, head to foot, Surveying, motionless and mute, Its work, ere, in a whirlwind rapt It vanish up again?—So hapt My chance. HE stood there. Like the smoke Pillared o’er Sodom, when day broke,— I saw him. One magnific pall Mantled in massive fold and fall His head, and coiled in snaky swathes About his feet: night’s black, that bathes All else, broke, grizzled with despair, Against the soul of blackness there. A gesture told the mood within— That wrapped right hand which based the chin That intense meditation fixed On his procedure,—pity mixed With the fulfilment of decree. Motionless, thus, he spoke to me, Who fell before his feet, a mass, No man now.

Then follows the Sentence, excluding him from the heaven of spirit, and leaving him to the world of sense, hopeless for ever of anything higher—a sentence which seemed to him at first to be rather a reward than a punishment, as he thought of “earth’s resources—vast exhaustless beauty, endless change of wonder!” Even a fern-leaf a museum in itself!

The answer of the Voice to this shallow thought leads us into the very loftiest regions of the imagination, suggesting views of the future of the redeemed which make the soul thrill with eager expectancy—