Loves Pilgrimage | Page 8

martial sounds!"
And afterwards, when he came to the palace that "rose like an

exhalation", all of Thyrsis' soul rose with it. One summer's day he stood
on a high mountain with a railroad in the valley, and saw a great
freight-engine stop still and pour out its masses of dense black smoke.
It rose in the breathless air, straight as a column, high and majestic; and
Thyrsis thought of that line. It carried him out into the heavens, and he
knew that a flash of poetry such as that is the meeting of man's groping
hand with God's.
It was about here that a strange adventure came to him. It was
midwinter, and he went out, long after midnight, to walk in a beautiful
garden. A dry powdery snow crunched beneath his feet, and overhead
the stars gleamed and quivered, so bright that he felt like stretching out
his hands to them. The world lay still, and awful in its beauty; and here
suddenly, unsuspected--unheralded, and quite unsought--there came to
Thyrsis a strange and portentous experience, the first of his ecstasies.
He could not have told whether he walked or sat down, whether he
spoke or was silent; he lost all sense of his own existence--his
consciousness was given up to the people of his dreams, the
companions and lovers of his fancy. The cold and snow were gone, and
there was a moonlit glade in a forest; and thither they came, one by one,
friendly and human, yet in the full panoply of their splendor and grace.
There were Shelley and Milton, and the gentle and troubled Hamlet,
and the sorrowful knight of la Mancha, with the irrepressible Falstaff to
hearten them all; a strangely-assorted company, yet royal spirits all of
them, and no strangers to each other in their own world. And here they
gathered and conversed, each in his own vein and from his own
impulse, with gracious fancy and lofty vision and heart-easing mirth.
And ah, how many miles would one have travelled to be with them!
That was the burden which this gift laid upon Thyrsis. He soon
discovered that these visions of wonder came but once, and that when
they were gone, they were gone forever. And he must learn to grapple
with them as they fled, to labor with them and to hold them fast, at the
cost of whatever heartbreaking strain. Thus alone could men have even
the feeblest reflexion of their beauty--upon which to feed their souls
forever after.

Section 7. These things came at the same time as another development
in Thyrsis' life, likewise portentous and unexpected. Boyhood was gone,
and manhood had come. There was a bodily change taking place in
him--he became aware of it with a start, and with the strangest and
most uncomfortable thrills. He did not know what to make of it, or
what to do about it; nor did he know where to turn for advice.
He tried to put it aside, as a thing of no importance. But it would not be
put aside--it was of vast importance. He discovered new desires in
himself, impulses that dominated him in a most disturbing way. He
found that he took a new interest in women and young girls; he wanted
to linger near them, and their glances caused him strange emotions. He
resented this, as an invasion of his privacy; it was inconsistent with his
hermit-instinct. Thyrsis wished no women in his life save the muses
with their star-sewn garments. He had been fond of a line from a sonnet
to Milton:
"Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart."
But instead of this, what awful humiliations! In a summer-resort where
he found himself, there was a girl of not very gentle breeding,
somewhat pudgy and with a languishing air. She liked to have boys
snuggle down by her; and so Thyrsis spent the whole of one evening,
sitting in a summer-house with an arm about her waist, dissolved in a
sort of moon-calf sentimentalism. And then he passed the rest of the
night wandering about in the forest cursing himself, with tears of shame
and vexation in his eyes.
He was so ignorant about these matters that he did not even know if the
changes that had taken place in him were normal, or whether they were
doing him harm. He made up his mind that he must have advice; as it
was unthinkable that he should speak about such shameful things with
any grown person, he bethought himself of a classmate in college who
was an earnest and sober man. This friend, much older than Thyrsis,
was the son of an evangelical clergyman, and was headed for the
ministry himself. His name was Warner, and Thyrsis had helped him in
arranging for some