During walks at Pantasaph and Lymington, Thompson penetrated on the one hand to places where thought is singed and scorched, on the other to healing regions of light; at one time deep in melancholy, at another buoyantly content. A. M. observed that during certain drives with Coventry Patmore he would sit looking at the floor of the carriage with the harrowing expression that one gathers from Rossetti's "Wood Spurge."
Imagination is onerous. Christina Rossetti points to more than a problem in artistry when she writes:--
"At first sight and apparently the easiest of all conceptions to realise, I yet suppose that there may, in the long run, be no conception more difficult for ourselves to clench and retain than this of absolute Unity; this oneness at all times, in all connexions, for all purposes."
But once grasped it may never be relinquished. And it is a commonplace of the mystics that contemplation is painful. St. John of the Cross's warning of the desolation that follows the dwelling in the neutral land between the temporal and the spiritual is one of many.
There is no escape. Conscience is another name for consciousness. "If men understood clearly they would sin at every step, wherefore they understand grossly, that sin may not be imputed to them," wrote F. T., half protesting against the disabilities of clear understanding. And again:--
"Life is an Inkermann, fought in the mist. If men saw clearly, they would despair to fight. Wherefore the Almighty opens the eyes only of those whom He has led by special ways of gradual inurement and preparation."
The futility of Francis's conversational repetition was a by-word; but when he said a thing twice in verse or prose it probably mattered more than most other things. "The Dread of Height" states the burden of knowledge, and John ix. 41., quoted as the poem's motto, is made to enforce it too:--"If ye were blind ye should have no sin; but now ye say We see, your sin remaineth." What John said (in ix. 41, or elsewhere) he would generally have thought sufficiently said. But in this matter he repeats John, and then more than once repeats himself.
A man does not, because he is as conscious of his God as were the disciples who really had Him on the road to Emmaus, find the road an easy one. Bunyan holds good; the better way is the roughest. The more excellent landscape is that which is seen against the sun. But it is rigid in its splendours; every cock of hay, every clod, is a shadow. Is the ear that hears "the winds their Maker magnify" happier than that which can note only rattling of windows and the cracking of boughs? During sound perhaps, not certainly during pauses in sound:--