“Fame failed me:  faith failed me:  and now this also,—­the hope that I nourished in this my generation of men,—­shall pass from me, and leave my feet and my hands groping.  Yet, because of this, are my feet become slow and my hands thin.  I am as one who, through the whole night, holding his way diligently, hath smitten the steel unto the flint, to lead some whom he knew darkling; who hath kept his eyes always on the sparks that himself made, lest they should fail; and who, towards dawn, turning to bid them that he had guided God speed, sees the wet grass untrodden except of his own feet.  I am as the last hour of the day, whose chimes are a perfect number; whom the next followeth not, nor light ensueth from him; but in the same darkness is the old order begun afresh.  Men say, ’This is not God nor man; he is not as we are, neither above us:  let him sit beneath us, for we are many.’  Where I write Peace, in that spot is the drawing of swords, and there men’s footprints are red.  When I would sow, another harvest is ripe.  Nay, it is much worse with me than thus much.  Am I not as a cloth drawn before the light, that the looker may not be blinded; but which sheweth thereby the grain of its own coarseness; so that the light seems defiled, and men say, ’We will not walk by it.’  Wherefore through me they shall be doubly accursed, seeing that through me they reject the light.  May one be a devil and not know it?”

As Chiaro was in these thoughts, the fever encroached slowly on his veins, till he could sit no longer, and would have risen; but suddenly he found awe within him, and held his head bowed, without stirring.  The warmth of the air was not shaken; but there seemed a pulse in the light, and a living freshness, like rain.  The silence was a painful music, that made the blood ache in his temples; and he lifted his face and his deep eyes.

A woman was present in his room, clad to the hands and feet with a green and grey raiment, fashioned to that time.  It seemed that the first thoughts he had ever known were given him as at first from her eyes, and he knew her hair to be the golden veil through which he beheld his dreams.  Though her hands were joined, her face was not lifted, but set forward; and though the gaze was austere, yet her mouth was supreme in gentleness.  And as he looked, Chiaro’s spirit appeared abashed of its own intimate presence, and his lips shook with the thrill of tears; it seemed such a bitter while till the spirit might be indeed alone.

She did not move closer towards him, but he felt her to be as much with him as his breath.  He was like one who, scaling a great steepness, hears his own voice echoed in some place much higher than he can see, and the name of which is not known to him.  As the woman stood, her speech was with Chiaro:  not, as it were, from her mouth or in his ears; but distinctly between them.