nrobin for the
first time knew his true name, and that was enough.
It is impossible to translate into precise language this torrent of
exquisite sensation that the girl's voice awakened. In the secret
chambers of his imagination Spinrobin found the _thoughts_, perhaps, that
clothed it with intelligible description for himself, but in speaking of
it to others he becomes simply semi-hysterical, and talks a kind of
hearty nonsense. For the truth probably is that only poetry or music can
convey any portion of a mystical illumination, otherwise hopelessly
incommunicable. The outer name had acted as a conductor to the inner name
beyond. It filled the room, and filled some far vaster space that opened
out above the room, about the house, above the earth, yet at the same
time was deep, deep down within his own self. He passed beyond the
confines of the world into those sweet, haunted gardens where Cherubim
and Seraphim--vast Forces--continually do sing. It floated him off his
feet as a rising tide overtakes the little shore-pools and floats them
into its own greatness, and on the tranquil bosom of these giant swells
he rose into a state that was too calm to be ecstasy, yet too glorious to
be mere exaltation.
And as his own little note of personal aspiration soared with this vaster
music to which it belonged, he felt mounting out of himself into a
condition where at last he was alive, complete and splendidly important.
His sense of insignificance fled. His ordinary petty and unvalued self
dropped away flake by flake, and he realized something of the essential
majesty of his own real Being as part of an eternal and wonderful Whole.
The little painful throb of his own limited personality slipped into the
giant pulse-beat of a universal vibration.
In his normal daily life, of course, he lost sight of this Whole, blinded
by the details seen without perspective, mistaking his little personality
for all there was of him; but now, as he rose, whirling, soaring, singing
in the body of this stupendous music, he understood with a rush of
indescribable glory that he was part and parcel of this great chord--this
particular chord in which Skale, Mrs. Mawle and Miriam also sang their
harmonious existences--that this chord, again, was part of a vaster music
still, and that all, in the last resort, was a single note in the divine
Utterance of God.
That is, the little secretary, for the first time in his existence, saw
life as a whole, a
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