Wilfrid Cumbermede by George MacDonald (desktop ebook reader txt) 📕

say not of human skill, but of human imagination, could cast a single connecting cord. There lay Mary, and here lay I-both in God's arms-utterly parted. As in a swoon I lay, through which suddenly came the words: 'What God hath joined, man cannot sunder.' I lay thinking what they could mean. All at once I thought I knew. Straightway I rose on the cloudy arm, looked down on a measureless darkness beneath me, and up on a great, dreary, world-filled eternity above me, and crept along the arm towards the bosom of God.

In telling my-neither vision nor dream nor ecstasy, I cannot help it that the forms grow so much plainer and more definite in the words than they were in the revelation. Words always give either too much or too little shape: when you want to be definite, you find your words clumsy and blunt; when you want them for a vague shadowy image, you straightway find them give a sharp and impertinent outline, refusing to lend themselves to your undefined though vivid thought. Forms themselves are hard enough to manage, but words are unmanageable. I must therefore trust to the heart of my reader.

I crept into the bosom of God, and along a great cloudy peace, which I could not understand, for it did not yet enter into me. At length I came to the heart of God, and through that my journey lay. The moment I entered it, the great peace appeared to enter mine, and I began to understand it. Something melted in my heart, and for a moment I thought I was dying, but I found I was being born again. My heart was empty of its old selfishness, and I loved Mary tenfold-no longer in the least for my own sake, but all for her loveliness. The same moment I knew that the heart of God was a bridge, along which I was crossing the unspeakable eternal gulf that divided Mary and me. At length, somehow, I know not how, somewhere, I know not where, I was where she was. She knew nothing of my presence, turned neither face nor eye to meet me, stretched out no hand to give me the welcome of even a friend, and yet I not only knew, but felt that she was mine. I wanted nothing from her; desired the presence of her loveliness only that I might know it; hung about her life as a butterfly over the flower he loves; was satisfied that she could be . I had left my self behind in the heart of God, and now I was a pure essence, fit to rejoice in the essential. But alas! my whole being was not yet subject to its best. I began to long to be able to do something for her besides-I foolishly said beyond loving her. Back rushed my old self in the selfish thought: Some day-will she not know-and at least-? That moment the vision vanished. I was tossed-ah! let me hope, only to the other arm of God-but I lay in torture yet again. For a man may see visions manifold, and believe them all; and yet his faith shall not save him; something more is needed-he must have that presence of God in his soul, of which the Son of Man spoke, saying: 'If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.' God in him, he will be able to love for very love's sake; God not in him, his best love will die into selfishness.


CHAPTER LX.


MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER.

The morning then which had thus dawned upon me, was often over-clouded heavily. Yet it was the morning and not the night; and one of the strongest proofs that it was the morning lay in this, that again I could think in verse.

One day, after an hour or two of bitterness, I wrote the following. A man's trouble must have receded from him a little for the moment, if he descries any shape in it, so as to be able to give it form in words. I set it down with no hope of better than the vaguest sympathy. There came no music with this one.

If it be that a man and a woman
Are made for no mutual grief;
That each gives the pain to some other,
And neither can give the relief;

If thus the chain of the world
Is tied round the holy feet,
I scorn to shrink from facing
What my brothers and sisters meet.

But I cry when the wolf is tearing
At the core of my heart as now:
When I was the man to be tortured,
Why should the woman be thou?

I am not so ready to sink from the lofty in to the abject now. If at times I yet feel that the whole creation is groaning and travailing, I know what it is for-its redemption from the dominion of its own death into that sole liberty which comes only of being filled and eternally possessed by God himself, its source and its life.

And now I found also that my heart began to be moved with a compassion towards my fellows such as I had never before experienced. I shall best convey what I mean by transcribing another little poem I wrote about the same time.

Once I sat on a crimson throne,
And I held the world in fee;
Below me I heard my brothers moan,
And I bent me down to see;-

Lovingly bent and looked on them,
But I had no inward pain;
I sat in the heart of my ruby gem,
Like a rainbow without the rain.

My throne is vanished; helpless I lie
At the foot of its broken stair;
And the sorrows of all humanity
Through my heart make a thoroughfare.

Let such things rest for a while: I have now to relate another incident-strange enough, but by no means solitary in the records of human experience. My reader will probably think that of dreams and visions there has already been more than enough: but perhaps she will kindly remember that at this time I had no outer life at all. Whatever bore to me the look of existence was within me. All my days the tendency had been to an undue predominance of thought over action, and now that the springs of action were for a time dried up, what wonder was it if thought, lording it alone, should assume a reality beyond its right? Hence the life of the day was prolonged into the night; nor was there other than a small difference in their conditions, beyond the fact that the contrast of outer things was removed in sleep; whence the shapes which the waking thought had assumed had space and opportunity, as it were, to thicken before the mental eye until they became dreams and visions.

But concerning what I am about to relate I shall offer no theory. Such mere operation of my own thoughts may be sufficient to account for it: I would only ask-does any one know what the mere operation of his own thoughts signifies? I cannot isolate myself, especially in those moments when the individual will is less awake, from the ocean of life and thought which not only surrounds me, but on which I am in a sense one of the floating bubbles.

I was asleep, but I thought I lay awake in bed-in the room where I still slept-that which had been my grannie's.-It was dark midnight, and the wind was howling about the gable and in the chimneys. The door opened, and some one entered. By the lamp she carried I knew my great-grandmother,-just as she looked in life, only that now she walked upright and with ease. That I was dreaming is plain from the fact that I felt no surprise at seeing her.

'Wilfrid, come with me,' she said, approaching the bedside. 'Rise.'

I obeyed like a child.

'Put your cloak on,' she continued. 'It is a stormy midnight, but we have not so far to go as you may think.'

'I think nothing, grannie,' I said. 'I do not know where you want to take me.'

'Come and see then, my son. You must at last learn what has been kept from you far too long.'

As she spoke she led the way down the stair, through the kitchen, and out into the dark night. I remember the wind blowing my cloak about, but I remember nothing more until I found myself in the winding hazel-walled lane, leading to Umberden Church. My grannie was leading me by one withered hand; in the other she held the lamp, over the flame of which the wind had no power. She led me into the churchyard, took the key from under the tombstone, unlocked the door of the church, put the lamp into my hand, pushed me gently in, and shut the door behind me. I walked to the vestry, and set the lamp on the desk, with a vague feeling that I had been there before, and that I had now to do something at this desk. Above it I caught sight of the row of vellum-bound books, and remembered that one of them contained something of importance to me. I took it down. The moment I opened it I remembered with distinctness the fatal discrepancy in the entry of my grannie's marriage. I found the place: to my astonishment the date of the year was now the same as that on the preceding page-1747. That instant I awoke in the first gush of the sunrise.

I could not help feeling even a little excited by my dream, and the impression of it grew upon me: I wanted to see the book again. I could not rest. Something seemed constantly urging me to go and look at it. Half to get the thing out of my head, I sent Styles to fetch Lilith, and for the first time since the final assurance of my loss, mounted her. I rode for Umberden Church.

It was long after noon before I had made up my mind, and when, having tied Lilith to the gate, I entered the church, one red ray from the setting sun was nestling in the very roof. Knowing what I should find, yet wishing to see it again, I walked across to the vestry, feeling rather uncomfortable at the thought of prying thus alone into the parish register.

I could almost have persuaded myself that I was dreaming still; and in looking back, I can hardly in my mind separate