Canto the Sixth. Silence and Moonlight.
1. Ranolf can find no one. Silence. Moonlight. 2. A lizard and a
mantis watching. 3. Sudden sense of the phenomenal character of
things visible, and consciousness of the Spiritual and Real. 4.
What is this Soul in Nature?—5. Returning, his hand touched.
6. A vision.
I.
So Ranolf musing, down the hill
Had sauntered to the trickling rill.
There, all save its low plash was still;
Only a movement caught his eye
Scarce visible, as he drew nigh
The thicket dense that grew thereby;
Only a bough's-top in the brake
Did for a single moment shake.
He pushed straight towards it through the broom;
But finding nothing in the gloom,
Came out upon the open Lake.
Still all was lonely—silent—bright;
Only himself and living light!—
He followed where the pathway wound
Beneath the cliffs, with many a turn
Round buttressed steep, projecting mound,
And waterscarped low spur tree-crowned,
Or rocky—bare of bush or fern.
One of these last he just had passed:—
Beyond it lay in deepest shade
A dense ravine's mouth, which had made
With clustered shrubs a safe retreat
For foemen of pursuit afraid.
He paused:—could mark no trace of feet,
No sign of life—before—around;
Saw nothing move—heard not a sound—
But keenly gazed into the gloom profound.
No sound, indeed, no motion. All in tune
With speaking Silence. Even the Moon
Lulled in the lap of Heaven serene
Lay back—albeit with watchful mien.
Transfigured by her flooding rays
To airy cloud, the Mountains blue
Up to their floating goddess threw
A rapt and meditative gaze.
II.
Upon the moonlit fractured rock beside him,
With not a rustle that the ear would strike,
A rapid-wriggling Lizard lightning-like
Leapt into stoniest stillness. In the dark,
Only a steady diamond spark
Told where it watching stood and sidelong eyed him.
“How well,” he thought, “these creatures suit,
How well uphold their ill-repute;
By all these natives held in dread,
Because informed by Spirits of the dead.”
In the full stream of light,
Close to his cheek, projecting on his right,
His glance was resting on a bright green sprig
Of broom-like myrtle.—As he looked, it grew
To something that was watching too.
A span-long Phasmid then he knew,
Stretching its forelimbs like a branching twig
In air, and motionless as death—
Save that it swayed its frail form to and fro
Gently, as in a soft wind's dying breath,
And then subsided slow
To rigid stillness. There,
Its forelimbs still outstretched in air,
With startling faith in its weird wondrous trick
Of aping lower life, the animated Stick
In watchful mood
Close to his cheek unmoving stood.
III.
Suspense how fixed and strange—
Dumb witchery of magic change!
Swift spritelike life to seeming death—and seeming
Inanimate life to deathlike animation—
The real and seeming seemed to waver, reel, and mingle!
“One of those flashes for a moment gleaming,”
Such our self-watching watcher's meditation—
“When o'er the Soul the thought will pass,
‘Is it illusion then, this whole Creation,
This outward Universe, a breath on glass?’—
One of those pauses in the rush
Of Life's phantasmagoric dreaming,
When in the hush,
The Spiritual speaks in vivid hints that tingle
Through our material framework, listening vigilant;
And as the deep-sea plummet, Consciousness,
Strikes soundings on the eternal adamant
Beneath the visionary Ocean
Whereon our frail barks ever forward press,
And rock and nod
With such unquiet motion,—
Lo! the revealing veil of God
Called Nature—as transpierced by darkling light
Divine—imprisoned splendour—on the fret
To escape for all her cunning might,
Emits keen sparkles in her own despite;
And seems one moment almost to forget
Her tantalizing trust, her mystic high vocation;
Seems for a thrilling moment, just about
To turn transparent wholly, and to let
Her awful Secret out.”
The conscious Silence seemed to win
Its way across the fleshly dross
To some responsive sense akin
His own deep soul within;
As in the shadowy river pool
Below the rapids, still and full,
Two floating globules nearing run
Together into one.
And now a little breath of air,
That had, it seemed, been lurking there,
Itself the moonlit calm enjoying,
Along the white bright-shadowy cliffs behind him,
Stealing as if glad to find him,
Came creeping through his hair and with its clusters toying;
Then passed—and left the lonely shore,
Hushed and breathless as before.
Again the haunting shy mistrust
Of Nature's simplest doings thrust
Its coy suggestive self between
The sensuous impress on his brain
And the conclusion, else so plain,
Of what it was, might be or mean.
Almost he could have held it true,
That fancy of the land he knew,
The creeping breeze must be a Spirit too
He dallied with the whim awhile;
Then with a musing smile,
His idle quest renounced as vain,
Turned his cottage to regain.
IV.
“What is there,” he thought, “in the scene, in the hour,
The moonlight—the silence—that tempts us to dower
All Nature thus with spiritual power?
Can it be that their magical influence
But awakes in ourselves a keener sense
Of some mysterious manifold chain—
The myriad channels that may knit
Magnetic currents of the brain,
Or subtler filaments more fit,
Along which Thought and Feeling flit,
To those that permeate Air and Earth
And all things that from these have birth?
Linking in one consentient whole
All Nature to each living Soul;
And opening for each Soul again
Subtle ways of intercourse
With every other, near, aloof;
An infinite web of spiritual force,
An universal warp-and-woof
Of Sympathy; though yet but rare
The minds whereby, the moments when,
The mystic threads and what they bear
(Like gossamers fine in autumn air
That softly undulate, float, and run,
Viewless but where they catch the sun)
Are brought within the conscious ken?”
V.
Slowly, and with looks downbent,
On such wayward thoughts intent,
By the rocky path he went.
Suddenly a hand is thrown
Lightly, softly on his own.
Lightly as rosy apple-bloom
Comes twirling to the orchard-grass,
When April winds that gaily pass
Kiss it away to its sunny doom.
So softly o'er his fingers flew
That timid playful pressure too—
The velvet plumage, all aglow
With jetty black and violet blue,
Of the crimson-billed porphyrio,
That jerking struts among the cool
Thick rushes by their rust-red pool—
Felt never more soft, more downy-smooth.
Quickly turned the startled youth,
And the sight that met his eyes
Brightened them with glad surprise.
VI.
There was a deeply scooped recess
In the rock-side's ruggedness,
Hollow and arching: you discern
Through the moon-illumined gloom,
Mantling it above, below,
Wondrous work of Nature's loom—
Delicate broidery like a bride's—
Traceried wealth of many a fern.
Some are filmy-fine and soaking wet,
By the ever-oozing lymph
Matted to its dripping sides;
Some are thatch-like thick-layered—some plume-like and free;
Some like fingers outspread, that caressing and fond
Would clutch at all comers whoever they be;
Some soft, silver-woven, down-pointing and broad,
Like Seraphim's wings when their eyes they would shade
From the shock of that Robe-Skirt's ineffable load
Of splendour that else the high heavens dismayed!
But finger-like, feather-like, wing-like,—each frond
(As by daylight the curious eye might see!)
Bedropt and bestudded and thickly beset
With intricate, daintiest fancy-freaks
Of golden spots and russet streaks.
More gracefully draperied niche never yet
Enshrined the pure graces of goddess or nymph;
And rarely has Goddess or Wood-nymph been
With statelier graces endued than were seen
In the Maiden who stood in that alcove so green!
