Today I lost a nation in the cycle of my soul. What is the blood
but the history of my planets as engraved upon the constellations of
my flesh? It is the book of the angel of judgment for the first
syllable of my song, as the emotions, the intellect, and, alas, the
will, for the second, third, and fourth. The flesh is the ebb tide
from God, as the emotions are the flood. The intellect is the second
ebb, and in the will pray God that it may be flood! The other is
Hell....
July 31.
... A victory for the will this morning. ... Tomorrow is the first of
August, and I shall enter upon my forty days. The ringing in my ears
is the ringing of my fleshly stars "toned all in Time." I have
commenced an anthology of high imaginings more worthy than a book of
essays of that title I have loved and desired to use for
years,--_Flame and Dew_. If rightly done, it may do poetry one of the
greatest of services by assisting it to praise Beauty on many lips in
naked Light. I wish to consecrate my work on it to that end. Today I
have been influenced by Frederick Tennyson, Traherne, and Patmore. In
agony lies the highest music. The key is struck by circumstance,
Time's organist, and the stars tremble with music. For the full
thundering silence of Absolute Beauty a Divine Agony was necessary, so
that all Heaven and its choirs and Hell trembled in the majesty of
this _stricken_ Doom. Death is the final chord, the passage of our
full song from time to the silence of eternity.
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