Donal Grant, George MacDonald [classic novels for teens txt] 📗

received from home, especially those of his friend sir Gibbie, who not unfrequently wrote also for Donal's father and mother, were a great nourishment to him.

As the cold and the nights grew, the water-level rose in Donal's well, and the poetry began to flow. When we have no summer without, we must supply it from within. Those must have comfort in themselves who are sent to help others. Up in his aerie, like an eagle above the low affairs of the earth, he led a keener life, breathed the breath of a more genuine existence than the rest of the house. No doubt the old cobbler, seated at his last over a mouldy shoe, breathed a yet higher air than Donal weaving his verse, or reading grand old Greek, in his tower; but Donal was on the same path, the only path with an infinite end-the divine destiny.

He had often thought of trying the old man with some of the best poetry he knew, desirous of knowing what receptivity he might have for it; but always when with him had hitherto forgot his proposed inquiry, and thought of it again only after he had left him: the original flow of the cobbler's life put the thought of testing it out of his mind.

One afternoon, when the last of the leaves had fallen, and the country was bare as the heart of an old man who has lived to himself, Donal, seated before a great fire of coal and boat-logs, fell a thinking of the old garden, vanished with the summer, but living in the memory of its delight. All that was left of it at the foot of the hill was its corpse, but its soul was in the heaven of Donal's spirit, and there this night gathered to itself a new form. It grew and grew in him, till it filled with its thoughts the mind of the poet. He turned to his table, and began to write: with many emendations afterwards, the result was this:-

THE OLD GARDEN.

I.

I stood in an ancient garden
With high red walls around; Over them gray and green lichens
In shadowy arabesque wound.

The topmost climbing blossoms
On fields kine-haunted looked out; But within were shelter and shadow,
And daintiest odours about.

There were alleys and lurking arbours-
Deep glooms into which to dive; The lawns were as soft as fleeces-
Of daisies I counted but five.

The sun-dial was so aged
It had gathered a thoughtful grace; And the round-about of the shadow
Seemed to have furrowed its face.

The flowers were all of the oldest
That ever in garden sprung; Red, and blood-red, and dark purple,
The rose-lamps flaming hung.

Along the borders fringéd
With broad thick edges of box, Stood fox-gloves and gorgeous poppies,
And great-eyed hollyhocks.

There were junipers trimmed into castles,
And ash-trees bowed into tents; For the garden, though ancient and pensive,
Still wore quaint ornaments.

It was all so stately fantastic,
Its old wind hardly would stir: Young Spring, when she merrily entered,
Must feel it no place for her!

II.

I stood in the summer morning
Under a cavernous yew; The sun was gently climbing,
And the scents rose after the dew.

I saw the wise old mansion,
Like a cow in the noonday-heat, Stand in a pool of shadows
That rippled about its feet.

Its windows were oriel and latticed,
Lowly and wide and fair; And its chimneys like clustered pillars
Stood up in the thin blue air.

White doves, like the thoughts of a lady,
Haunted it in and out; With a train of green and blue comets,
The peacock went marching about.

The birds in the trees were singing
A song as old as the world, Of love and green leaves and sunshine,
And winter folded and furled.

They sang that never was sadness
But it melted and passed away; They sang that never was darkness
But in came the conquering day.

And I knew that a maiden somewhere,
In a sober sunlit gloom, In a nimbus of shining garments,
An aureole of white-browed bloom,

Looked out on the garden dreamy,
And knew not that it was old; Looked past the gray and the sombre,
And saw but the green and the gold.

III.

I stood in the gathering twilight,
In a gently blowing wind; And the house looked half uneasy,
Like one that was left behind.

The roses had lost their redness,
And cold the grass had grown; At roost were the pigeons and peacock,
And the dial was dead gray stone.

The world by the gathering twilight
In a gauzy dusk was clad; It went in through my eyes to my spirit,
And made me a little sad.

Grew and gathered the twilight,
And filled my heart and brain; The sadness grew more than sadness,
And turned to a gentle pain.

Browned and brooded the twilight,
And sank down through the calm, Till it seemed for some human sorrows
There could not be any balm.

IV.

Then I knew that, up a staircase,
Which untrod will yet creak and shake, Deep in a distant chamber,
A ghost was coming awake.

In the growing darkness growing-
Growing till her eyes appear, Like spots of a deeper twilight,
But more transparent clear-

Thin as hot air up-trembling,
Thin as a sun-molten crape, The deepening shadow of something
Taketh a certain shape;

A shape whose hands are uplifted
To throw back her blinding hair; A shape whose bosom is heaving,
But draws not in the air.

And I know, by what time the moonlight
On her nest of shadows will sit, Out on the dim lawn gliding
That shadow of shadows will flit.

V.

The moon is dreaming upward
From a sea of cloud and gleam; She looks as if she had seen us
Never but in a dream.

Down that stair I know she is coming,
Bare-footed, lifting her train; It creaks not-she hears it creaking,
For the sound is in her brain.

Out at the side-door she's coming,
With a timid glance right and left! Her look is hopeless yet eager,
The look of a heart bereft.

Across the lawn she is flitting,
Her eddying robe in the wind! Are her fair feet bending the grasses?
Her hair is half lifted behind!

VI.

Shall I stay to look on her nearer?
Would she start and vanish away? No, no; she will never see me,
If I stand as near as I may!

It is not this wind she is feeling,
Not this cool grass below; 'Tis the wind and the grass of an evening
A hundred years ago.

She sees no roses darkling,
No stately hollyhocks dim; She is only thinking and dreaming
Of the garden, the night, and him;

Of the unlit windows behind her,
Of the timeless dial-stone, Of the trees, and the moon, and the shadows,
A hundred years agone.

'Tis a night for all ghostly lovers
To haunt the best-loved spot: Is he come in his dreams to this garden?
I gaze, but I see him not.

VII.

I will not look on her nearer-
My heart would be torn in twain; >From mine eyes the garden would vanish
In the falling of their rain!

I will not look on a sorrow
That darkens into despair; On the surge of a heart that cannot-
Yet cannot cease to bear!

My soul to hers would be calling-
She would hear no word it said; If I cried aloud in the stillness,
She would never turn her head!

She is dreaming the sky above her,
She is dreaming the earth below:- This night she lost her lover,
A hundred years ago.


CHAPTER XXVIII.

A PRESENCE YET NOT A PRESENCE.

The twilight had fallen while he wrote, and the wind had risen. It was now blowing a gale. When he could no longer see, he rose to light his lamp, and looked out of the window. All was dusk around him. Above and below was nothing to be distinguished from the mass; nothing and something seemed in it to share an equal uncertainty. He heard the wind, but could not see the clouds that swept before it, for all was cloud overhead, and no change of light or feature showed the shifting of the measureless bulk. Gray stormy space was the whole idea of the creation. He was gazing into a void-was it not rather a condition of things inappreciable by his senses? A strange feeling came over him as of looking from a window in the wall of the visible into the region unknown, to man shapeless quite, therefore terrible, wherein wander the things all that have not yet found or form or sensible embodiment, so as to manifest themselves to eyes or ears or hands of mortals. As he gazed, the huge shapeless hulks of the ships of chaos, dimly awful suggestions of animals uncreate, yet vaguer motions of what was not, came heaving up, to vanish, even from the fancy, as they approached his window. Earth lay far below, invisible; only through the night came the moaning of the sea, as the wind drove it, in still enlarging waves, upon the flat shore, a level of doubtful grass and sand, three miles away. It seemed to his heart as if the moaning were the voice of the darkness, lamenting, like a repentant Satan or Judas, that it was not the light, could not hold the light, might not become as the light, but must that moment cease when the light began to enter it. Darkness and moaning was all that the earth contained! Would the souls of the mariners shipwrecked this night go forth into the ceaseless turmoil? or would they, leaving behind them the sense for storms, as for all things soft and sweet as well, enter only a vast silence, where was nothing to be aware of but each solitary self? Thoughts and theories many passed through Donal's mind as he sought to land the conceivable from the wandering bosom of the limitless; and he was just arriving at the conclusion, that, as all things seen must be after the fashion of the unseen whence they come, as the