A Child of the Age (Adams)/Dedication
TO
A. L. A.
Vita janua mortis.
Let me think of you, O pure and radiant Spirit, as you were to me once, and as you are to me now.
I thought of you as noble, great, god-like. I saw only the serene beauty of what was best in you, and it transfigured all your Work, and gave it a divine significance. Now I notify faults in you and in it, grave faults and limitations as grave. My worship of you is over, and I discriminate in my very admiration. My worship is over, but I sometimes feel as if my love were scarcely begun. And I perceive also that, even in my boyhood's doting blindness, I yet saw clearly; for, to me as I was then, you were indeed wonderfully significant, noble, great, god-like. You were the father of my soul no less than of my body, and the yearning to achieve Works not altogether unworthy of the simple grandeur of truth and contemplation found its well-spring in the light and limpidity of your heavenly-brooding eyes.
You never knew this, and now you will never know it.
When I passed from the blinding midsummer light that lay deep upon the green strange earth and the blue and winding sea-gulf and entered that shadowy room—when I closed the door, and, in all the fulness of my solitary anguish, bent and kissed you on the eyes and lips (You could not withdraw yourself from my embrace, O my love, O my god, for all your transcendant beauty of perfected life!), it was as if some unloved and unregarded Lazarus had kissed the dead lips and eyes of Christ. You were my Christ. You raised me from the dead, from the hell of the departed, and my faith was to accomplish the equal miracle of your own resurrection.
But the disillusionment of the evolution of time, for all true Spirits, though it is grievous and implacable, has the most precious consolations. As I have lost Christ the Son of God, but have gained Jesus the Son of Man, and count my loss for gain: so, O pure and radiant Spirit, I have but changed the impassioned idolisation my boyhood lavished upon you for a chaster affection, an everlasting regard.
1886.
'Die and live again! For so long as thou hast not done so, thou art nought but a bewildered stranger upon the darksome earth.'