murmuring them, this love of God a magic gulf wherein their own
more bitter passion may bathe and renew its youth. At every
moment the heart of this poet flows outward to these without
derogation or condescension, for it has known that they will
understand; and it has filled itself with the circumstance of
their lives. The traveller in the read-brown clothes that he
wears that dust may not show upon him, the girl searching in her
bed for the petals fallen from the wreath of her royal lover, the
servant or the bride awaiting the master's home-coming in the
empty house, are images of the heart turning to God. Flowers and
rivers, the blowing of conch shells, the heavy rain of the Indian
July, or the moods of that heart in union or in separation; and a
man sitting in a boat upon a river playing lute, like one of
those figures full of mysterious meaning in a Chinese picture, is
God Himself. A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably
strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination;
and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because
we have met our own image, as though we had walked in Rossetti's
willow wood, or heard, perhaps for the first time in literature,
our voice as in a dream.

Since the Renaissance the writing of European saints--however
familiar their metaphor and the general structure of their
thought--has ceased to hold our attention. We know that we must
at last forsake the world, and we are accustomed in moments of
weariness or exaltation to consider a voluntary forsaking; but
how can we, who have read so much poetry, seen so many paintings,
listened to so much music, where the cry of the flesh and the cry
of the soul seems one, forsake it harshly and rudely? What have
we in common with St. Bernard covering his eyes that they may