so considered that no single word could have been altered, and the "essay" might have been published as it stood—lectures, in a word, that enthralled and held me spellbound for hours at a time. For his knowledge was not knowledge merely, it was knowledge transmuted by emotion into that spiritual wisdom called Understanding.
The respect he inspired me with was such that rarely did I venture upon a personal question, though I longed to know more about himself and his mysterious story. His face sometimes betrayed intense mental suffering. On one occasion, feeling braver, owing to a happy mood that seemed established naturally between us, I attempted rather an intimate question of some kind about his past. He turned and stared with an expression that startled me. It was so keen, so searching. For several minutes he made no reply. His eyes narrowed. I felt ashamed. I had wounded him. The truth was, it seems, I had touched his heart.
"Listen," he said presently. In a voice full of tears and deep emotion, a very quiet, a very beautiful voice, he replied to my question. The expression of his eyes turned inwards, there rose in memory the ghostly figure of someone he had loved, perhaps loved still. The whole aspect of the old exiled poet became charged with an intolerable sadness, as he spoke the lines, not to myself, but to this vanished figure—"Shadowed by yearning memory's raven wing":
Through all that my poor words can say or sing,
The measure of the love to thee I bring.
One day thou wilt, when, by a graven stone
That bears a name, thou standest, white, alone,
Shadowed by yearning memory's raven wing,
Rained on by blossoms of some wind-torn spring
Wherefrom thirst-quenching fruit shall ne'er be grown.
Then—power shall rest upon the vanished hand
Once too much trembling to thy touch for power;
Then—shall my soul at last thy soul command
As it might not in Time's brief fitful hour;
And what Life's fires might neither melt nor burn
Shall yield with tears to ashes and the urn.
