第73章

--That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine.Ibelieve her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times, --if it does not really get freed or half freed from her own.Did you ever see a case of catalepsy? You know what I mean,--transient loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position in which they are put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure.She had been talking with him and listening to him one day when the boarders moved from the table nearly all at once.But she sat as before, her cheek resting on her hand, her amber eyes wide open and still.Iwent to her, she was breathing as usual, and her heart was beating naturally enough,--but she did not answer.I bent her arm; it was as plastic as softened wag, and kept the place I gave it.--This will never do, though, and I sprinkled a few drops of water on her forehead.She started and looked round.--I have been in a dream,--she said;--I feel as if all my strength were in this arm;--give me your hand! --She took my right hand in her left, which looked soft and white enough, but--Good Heaven! I believe she will crack my bones! All the nervous power in her body must have flashed through those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,--she who could hardly glove herself when in her common health.Iris turned pale, and the tears came to her eyes;--she saw she had given pain.Then she trembled, and might have fallen but for me;--the poor little soul had been in one of those trances that belong to the spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly those of women.

To come back to this wondrous book of Iris.Two pages faced each other which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind.

On the left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked with a single bird.No trace of earth, but still the winged creature seemed to be soaring upward and upward.Facing it, one of those black dungeons such as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured.

I am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of his, out of which the Opium-Eater got his nightmare vision, described by another as "cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous and forbidden things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions among mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscriptions."Such a black dungeon faced the page that held the blue sky and the single bird; at the bottom of it something was coiled,--what, and whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not make out.

I told you the young girl's soul was in this book.As I turned over the last leaves I could not help starting.There were all sorts of faces among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders that ran round the pages.They had mostly the outline of childish or womanly or manly beauty, without very distinct individuality.

But at last it seemed to me that some of them were taking on a look not wholly unfamiliar to me; there were features that did not seem new.--Can it be so? Was there ever such innocence in a creature so full of life? She tells her heart's secrets as a three-years-old child betrays itself without need of being questioned! This was no common miss, such as are turned out in scores from the young-lady-factories, with parchments warranting them accomplished and virtuous,--in case anybody should question the fact.I began to understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret of a real femme incomprise?--for such there are, though they are not the ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.

Poets are never young, in one sense.Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them.A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.Ihave frequently seen children, long exercised by pain and exhaustion, whose features had a strange look of advanced age.Too often one meets such in our charitable institutions.Their faces are saddened and wrinkled, as if their few summers were threescore years and ten.

And so, many youthful poets have written as if their hearts were old before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool and saddening as that of evening in more common lives.The profound melancholy of those lines of Shelley,"I could lie down like a tired child And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear "came from a heart, as he says, "too soon grown old,"--at twenty-six years, as dull people count time, even when they talk of poets.

I know enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,--only this gift of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as well as in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of feeling and imagery that takes me by surprise.And then besides, and most of all, I am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy confidence in me.Perhaps I owe it to my--Well, no matter! How one must love the editor who first calls him the venerable So-and-So!

--I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down.The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms.Very often it does not know what to do with genius.Talent is a docile creature.It bows its head meekly while the world slips the collar over it.It backs into the shafts like a lamb.It draws its load cheerfully, and is patient of the bit and of the whip.But genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train.

Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius,--namely, that it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will, and therefore more distinctly human in its character.Genius, on the other hand, is much more like those instincts which govern the admirable movements of the lower creatures, and therefore seems to have something of the lower or animal character.A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.A poet, like the goose, sails without visible landmarks to unexplored regions of truth, which philosophy has yet to lay down on its atlas.