Tilth

“ There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave — under the deep deep sea,
Or in wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
No voice is hush'd — no life treads silently,
But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free. ”

“ Perchance she whispers day by day,
"He comes to-morrow."
I linger in the silent lane,
And high above the clover plain
The clouds are riven;
Across the fields she used to know
The light breaks, and the wind sighs low,
"Loved and forgiven." ”

“ I care not though I never see A calm blue sky again.
Too Long, O Spirit of Storm Too long, O Spirit of Storm, Thy lightning sleeps in its sheath! I am sick to the soul of yon pallid sky, And the moveless sea beneath. Come down in thy strength on the deep! Worse dangers there are in life, When the waves are still, and the skies look fair, Than in their wildest strife. A friend I knew, whose days Were as calm as this sky overhead; But one blue morn that was fairest of all, The heart in his bosom fell dead. ”

“ Time flows into the void; night’s shadows quake with dearth,
The dikes of the black sea of space crumble beneath the night’s wrath,
The heavy foam of darkness sputters forth, and the earth
Swallowed by the gaping depths, swerves from its beaten path. ”

“ Its sunshine or its tears;
While the to-morrows stand and wait,
The silent mutes by the outer gate.
There is no end to the sky,
And the stars are everywhere,
And time is eternity,
And the here is over there ”

“ Under spread ensigns marching, might pass through
With horse and chariots ranked in loose array;
So wide they stood, and like a furnace mouth
Cast forth redounding smoke and ruddy flame.
Before their eyes in sudden view appear890
The secrets of the hoary Deep, a dark,
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place, are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand. ”

“ Thou would'st have brought us welcome, and with mirth
Led all our thoughts away from winter's dearth,
Had fate but left thy beauty unimperilled.
In this sad world, thine is a common fate,
A world in which the gentlest heart fares worst,
Borne down. ”

“ So from the abyss of the soul there emerge shapes definite, and scenes of a strange clarity. In the boundless day which dawns once more, ever the same, with its great monotonous beat, there begins to show forth the round of days, hand in hand, and some of their forms are smiling, others sad. But ever the links of the chain are broken, and memories are linked together above weeks and months....
The River ... the Bells ... as long as he can remember--far back in the abysses of time, at every hour of his life--always their voices, familiar and resonant, have rung out.... ”

“ A vast silence holds the place, save for the deep undertone of the rushing water far below, so deep and so distant that it is rather like a dull vibration in my brain than a sound in my ears. The heavy buzzing of a fly and the rattle of the wind in the brim of my straw hat do not break this impression of great silence ”

“ Then the calm which follows the wake of the storm, the consciously averted eyes, and the very conscious breathing, which had in it something of shame; the almost aversion to speak or touch again, and over all, the deep silence of the moor, broken only by the burn and the whaup, and the thick cloud, kindly dark, that came over the moon.
But, behind it all, the remorse and the agony that would never die; the anxiety and uncertainty, and the secret knowledge for which each had paid so high a price. ”

“ When it is calm, as it was that morning, the silence, uninterrupted by any movement or sound, is peculiarly striking. That morning in the steppe it was quiet and dull, though the sun had already risen. ”

“ Silent the wind — silent the strain
Of the rain-drops dropping slow.
All would be silent and with one sigh
A silent world would float on the sky.
Worlds such as these, made of silent tears,
They call the music of the spheres! ”

“ The mainspring being broken in his mind,
A clock himself, if one were so inclined,
That stood at twenty minutes after three—
The reason being for this, it might be said,
That things in death were neither clocks nor people, but only dead. ”

“ They felt that spring was theirs too, as it was—glory as fair as brief—with promise as a beginning and storm and desolation as an ending; like two trees that put forth green leaves in the sunshine, only later to have them torn and destroyed, and they themselves fall stricken by the storm to earth. ”

“ Intermittent calls break upon the air, and long-drawn infinitely mournful wailings, that sometimes swell and sometimes seem to be strangled and end in a kind of sob. And then, in spite of the sonority of the vast straight walls, in spite of the echoes which prolong the cries, the silence obstinately returns. ”

“ There is no morning, how can it sleep? It is nothing but the hour when the sun rises. Plague! The sun does not rise, that too is nonsense and poetry. Oh! if I had but my will with language, and might properly scour and sweep it! ”

“ Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a dream. ”

“ As the Spirits continue their song, accompanying the watches of the night, the dawn approaches to the ear of mortal men calmly and gently, but to the sense of Spirits, the march of the hours is heard as a storm: the gigantic rock-gates of the East creak fearfully; Phœbus rolls his chariot wheels in thunder; and eye and ear are startled at the strong coming of the day. ”

“ Over the land a shadowy light is spread,
And with the night the storm winds die away.
The waves have brought their burden to her feet,
Her drownèd love, with blood-red seaweed crowned,
Her drownèd love — oh, bitter yoke and sweet
With which love's hands our idle hearts have bound! ”

“ So day by day they strove to be oblivious of one another and not heed the cloud that impended—a bald-headed, gray-eyed cloud which rumbled enigmatic thunder threats—and the time grew shorter before their month's reprieve, when Limes would be away. ”

“ The Psalmist goes on—'A day in Thy courts is better than a thousand; I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.' 'A day in Thy courts is better than a thousand.' We all know how strangely elastic time is, and have sometimes been amazed when we remembered what an infinity of joy or sorrow we had lived through in one tick of the pendulum. When men are dreaming, they pass through a long series of events in a moment's space. ”

“ They have given over their watchfulness, their close observation of marks; the breath of prayer has fallen to a stillness; the waves seem to gleam and ripple and rustle as of old, and how shall the unearnest heart and the unwatchful eye ever know that the tide is going down?—a sinking so gradual, so stealthy, with such slight difference from day to day. ”

“ On the morning of the second day, after a sleep of thirty hours, I awoke again to the world, with a system utterly prostrate and unstrung, and a brain clouded with the lingering images of my visions. I knew where I was, and what had happened to me, but all that I saw still remained unreal and shadowy. ”

“ How easy to climb into one of their baskets, and in the fairy craft drift far, far away! How pleasant, too, if only the noon of the year would last and last; if only the warm sun would shine and shine; if only the soft sleepy winds would sleep and sleep; if only we had nothing to do but drift and drift and drift! ”

“ The very noise and hum of the great city seemed to have stopped—or, at least, we did not hear it. Could the world have stopped in its rotation, and the hand of Time have arrested itself in its dismal march? ”

“ Time itself was a nightmare of running, falling, rising, staggering, running again until the blood pounded in her temples, drummed in her ears. The cry came again, as near as before—nearer? Throughout the night as she struggled on she could always fancy the stealthy, silent feet following her, keeping time with her own. ”

“ Then comes a time of stillness when the light in the sky waxes and wanes, when the cloud-drifts obscure the stars, and I gaze out into blackness set with watching eyes. No sound comes from without but the voice of the night-wind and the cry of the hour. ”

“ It is not yet too late. My people, like the damsel in the Scriptures, is but sleeping, and not dead. Sleep is silent, but restores to strength. There is apparent silence also in nature before the storm. ”

“ If the clock strikes, the sound jars me; a million of hours will not bring back peace to my breast. The light startles me; the darkness terrifies me. I seem falling into a pit, without a hand to help me. ”

“ Other hours grew, lengthening into night. She sat beside him with never a word or sigh or whisper of breathing; and dream after dream swept him, like burning winds. Then sleep immersed him so that he lay senseless, sightless eyes still fixed on her. Hour after hour;—and the white glare died out, fading to a glimmer. ”

“ For delay there was, though of a few hours only; and this delay was caused by my uncomfortable new habit--pausing for the guidance and the "thrill." Intuition, waiting upon the thrill of Beauty that guided it, at first lay inactive. ”

“ Passed from my life, and left me dark and lone.
spring speaks.
Tothee, poor heart, I come with empty hands,
Mine are but blossoms born of sun and showers;
The hopes thou seekest grow not on my lands,
And thy dead loves revive not with my flowers.
Turn thee to other souls, more sad than thine,
Into their darkness bring the light of day ”

“ To soothe her I repeated that there was plenty of time.
She frowned, closed her eyes with one hand, and again replied in a curiously rapid, even tone.
“No! no! there never has been time. It is always a hurry. Out in the dark digging the grave, and the sand slipping, slipping, slipping till there is no room. ”

“ When silence is at its deathliest, one can hear almost the way the earth is moving on its axis. I waited until I felt that he had turned the corner to the stairs, then, with infinite care, manipulated, a fraction at a time, the handle of my own door, and, slipping off my pumps, emerged and followed, hardly breathing, in pursuit. ”

“ For the autumn leaves have covered
And hid the sodden ground.
[Pg 128]
THERE IS A RIFT IN THE CLOUDS.
Though life may be gloomy,
And dark be thy way,
No light in thy pathway,
Not even one ray.
Look up to the heavens;
There’s a rift in the clouds.
Though life may be warfare,
Thy heart have no peace,
Fear not, thou wilt conquer,
Thy heart have surcease.
Look upward, not downward,
There’s a rift in the clouds.
Though friends may prove faithless,
And false unto thee;
There may be a reason
That thou dost not see.
Have charity always,
[Pg 129] And see rift in the clouds. ”

“ The monotonous tick of an old clock is the only sound, saving the longdrawn sigh of that young mother, or the quick, hollow breathing of the sleeping man. Now and then the wind whistles more shrilly through the crevices of the door, and the rain beats with greater force against the little window. ”

“ The ‘dead pause abrupt of mighty winds’ is the pause of mighty winds and not of gentle breezes; and it is not the absence of mighty winds, but their pause before they burst into renewed fury; or if their silence is not their will, it is a silence imposed on them by something mightier even than they. ”

“ Let one sit with closed eyes and, abstracting entirely from the outer world, attend exclusively to the passage of time, like one who wakes, as the poet says, "to hear time flowing in the middle of the night, and all things moving to a day of doom." ”

“ Can it be a misstep, in the darkness, into the abyss between the land of waking and the land where there are nor years nor months nor days, where the soul abides in Lethe,—save when some wing troubles the waters for a little while? ”

“ In the meantime night advances, the noise ceases by degrees—a profound silence succeeds, and there only remains of this evening the confused idea of a dream, in which the people had forgotten for a moment their labour, the learned their studies, and the nobility their idleness. ”

“ They utter the same cry when one quarter of the day has elapsed, at midday, again when three quarters of the day are over, and, last of all, at sunset; each time repeating the cry in shrill quavering tones, the effect of which is not unpleasing, and the sound can be heard at a distance that would astonish you. ”

“ As the racked body, and the mind, possibly beginning to be diseased, became intolerant of the odious sound, the motion of the clock was sometimes stopped, but the silence which succeeded was even worse to the disordered imagination than the voices which had preceded it. ”

“ In moods such as these one can hear in the far distance the wailing of a dirge, a knell, indefinitely yet distinctly, and the foreboding it brings is of an end to something which should have no end; a falling away, a premature decay which is like a growing cloud soon to cover the whole mind.... ”

“ Nothing now was left but the Shadow, and on that my eyes were intently fixed, till again eyes grew out of the Shadow,—malignant, serpent eyes. And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. ”

“ And with eager hands and strong,
We will lead the little children
Far away from paths of wrong."
But our hands grow old and feeble,
And the work goes on for aye,
And the little children perish,
Though to-morrow is to-day. ”

“ I hear my own pulse beat so loudly in the silence, it is horrible! There is a room below, by the window of which there is a tree, and the winds rock its boughs to and fro, and it sighs and groans like a living thing ”