felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet as when the virgin band,
the victors chaste, feel at the end the earthy garments drop,
and rise with something of a rosy shame into immortal nakedness:
so I lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill into the ecstasy
and out-throb pain. I' the gray of the dawn it was I found myself
facing the pillared front o' the Pieve -- mine, my church:
it seemed to say for the first time, `But am not I the Bride,
the mystic love o' the Lamb, who took thy plighted troth, my priest,
to fold thy warm heart on my heart of stone and freeze thee
nor unfasten any more? This is a fleshly woman, -- let the free
bestow their life blood, thou art pulseless now!' . . . Now,
when I found out first that life and death are means to an end,
that passion uses both, indisputably mistress of the man whose form
of worship is self-sacrifice -- now, from the stone lungs sighed
the scrannel voice, `Leave that live passion, come be dead with me!'
As if, i' the fabled garden, I had gone on great adventure,
plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit, and feasted to satiety,
laughing at such high fame for hips and haws, and scorned
the achievement: then come all at once o' the prize o' the place,
the thing of perfect gold, the apple's self: and, scarce my eye
on that, was 'ware as well of the sevenfold dragon's watch. Sirs,
I obeyed. Obedience was too strange, -- this new thing that had been
STRUCK INTO ME BY THE LOOK OF THE LADY, to dare disobey
the first authoritative word. 'Twas God's. I had been
LIFTED TO THE LEVEL OF HER, could take such sounds into my sense.
I said, `We two are cognizant o' the Master now; it is she bids me
bow the head: how true, I am a priest! I see the function here;
I thought the other way self-sacrifice: this is the true,
seals up the perfect sum. I pay it, sit down, silently obey.'"