The drinking of the pure well-water as wine is among the fatal signs of fire in the cup, showing Nature at work rather to enchain the victim than bid her daughter go.  Jane of course meant the poet’s ‘Nature.’  She did not reflect that the strong glow of poetic imagination is wanted to hallow a passionate devotion to the inanimate for this evokes the spiritual; and passionateness of any kind in narrower brains should be a proclamation to us of sanguine freshets not coming from a spiritual source.  But the heart betraying deluded her.  She fancied she had not ever been so wedded to Nature as on that walk through the bursting beechwoods, that sweet lonely walk, perfect in loneliness, where even a thought of a presence was thrust away as a desecration and images of souls in thought were shadowy.

Her lust of freedom gave her the towering holiday.  She took the delirium in her own pure fashion, in a love of the bankside flowers and the downy edges of the young beech-buds fresh on the sprays.  And it was no unreal love, though too intent and forcible to win the spirit from the object.  She paid for this indulgence of her mood by losing the spirit entirely.  At night she was a spent rocket.  What had gone she could not tell:  her very soul she almost feared.  Her glorious walk through the wood seemed burnt out.  She struck a light to try her poet on the shelf of the elect of earth by her bed, and she read, and read flatness.  Not his the fault!  She revered him too deeply to lay it on him.  Whose was it?  She had a vision of the gulfs of bondage.

Could it be possible that human persons were subject to the spells of persons with tastes, aims, practices, pursuits alien to theirs?  It was a riddle taxing her to solve it for the resistance to a monstrous iniquity of injustice, degrading her conception of our humanity.  She attacked it in the abstract, as a volunteer champion of our offended race.  And Oh! it could not be.  The battle was won without a blow.

Thereupon came glimpses of the gulfs of bondage, delicious, rose-enfolded, foreign; they were chapters of soft romance, appearing interminable, an endless mystery, an insatiable thirst for the mystery.  She heard crashes of the opera-melody, and despising it even more than the wretched engine of the harshness, she was led by it, tyrannically led a captive, like the organ-monkey, until perforce she usurped the note, sounded the cloying tune through her frame, passed into the vulgar sugariness, lost herself.

And saying to herself:  This is what moves them! she was moved.  One thrill of appreciation drew her on the tide, and once drawn from shore she became submerged.  Why am I not beautiful, was her thought.  Those voluptuous modulations of melting airs are the natural clothing of beautiful women.  Beautiful women may believe themselves beloved.  They are privileged to believe, they are born with the faith.

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