How still had the room been around it,
how silent the sunshine and the snow, while he had inhabited
tumult--tumult in his heart, tumult in his ears, tumult of sorrows,
of vain longings, of tongues and of swords! Where was the gain to
him? Was he nearer to that centre of peace, which the book, as it
lay there so still, seemed to his eyes to typify? The maiden loved
from childhood had left him for a foolish king and a phantom-church:
had he been himself pursuing anything better? He had been fighting
for the truth: had he then gained her? where was she? what was she
if not a living thing in the heart? Would the wielding of the sword
in its name ever embody an abstraction, call it from the vasty deep
of metaphysics up into self-conscious existence in the essence of a
man's own vitality? Was not the question still, how, of all loves,
to grasp the thing his soul thirsted after?
To many a sermon, cleric and lay, had he listened since he left that
volume there--in church, in barn, in the open field--but the
religion which seemed to fill all the horizon of these preachers'
vision, was to him little better than another tumult of words;
while, far beyond all the tumults, hung still, in the vast of
thought unarrived, unembodied, that something without a shape, yet
bearing a name around which hovered a vague light as of something
dimly understood, after which, in every moment of inbreaking
silence, his soul straightway began to thirst.
Pages:
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156