Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/289

263 THE FIRST MORRIS 263 Her tired feet look'd cold and thin, Her lips were twitch'd, and wretched tears, Some, as she lay, roll'd past her ears, Some fell from off her quivering chin. Her long throat, stretched to its full length. Rose up and fell right brokenly ; As though the unhappy heart was nigh Striving to break with all its strength. To this poor mortal, as to her namesake, " tortured by vain desire " amidst the floods, passion comes as cruelly as to Guenevere, confessedly anguished by remorse. The love that enters here is always the love that " hurts and makes afraid and wastes " ; and so, for us, it assumes the aspect of a flagellant, actually scourging out the desires of the flesh. And this strange annihilation of the body by its own eagerness, an eagerness that mounts into an ecstasy that consumes all but the pure flame of desire, is but one part of a larger or a nearer process of which it may be taken as an emblem. For throughout this book, on every plane, the very brightness of the beauty seems to burn away its earthly body. Just as the concentrated colours of a landscape may be used to stain a window meant to teach the instability of earthly beauty and to cloister up men's minds, so do these vivid courts and gardens seal us in an atmosphere of ritual, their special pagan clarity and brightness appearing not only to testify to the spirit's impassioned exaltation, but also to turn the flowers and vestments into emblems of that supernal beauty, beyond the barriers of sense, only to be attained by their destruc- tion, which is the reward of the frustration of the flesh. It seems so plain that the emotions that sweep us must come from a source superior to aesthetics, transcending knowledge itself. We are certainly not being lulled by mere music : the noise these words make is nothing, a