St. George and St. Michael. Volume II

Richard left the cottage, and mounted Oliver. To pass the time and / indulge a mournful memory, he rode round by Wyfern. When he reached / home, he found that his father had gone to pay a visit some miles / off. He went to his own room, cast himself on his bed, and tried to / think. But his birds would not come at his call, or coming would but / perch for a moment, and again fly. As he lay thus, his eyes fell on / his cousin, old Thomas Heywood's little folio, lying on the window / seat where he had left it two years ago, and straightway his / fluttering birds alighting there, he thought how the book had been / lying unopened all the months, while he had been passing through so / many changes and commotions. 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. And if the Truth was / not to be found in his own heart, could he think that the blows by / which he had not gained her had yet given her? -- that through means / of the tumult he had helped to arouse in her name and for her sake, / but in which he had never caught a sight of her beauteous form, she / now sat radiantly smiling in any one human soul where she sat not / before?