A COVERT answer to his seeking came.

In a far-shimmering background of Mind-Space

Pleading with some still impenetrable Mind,

Into a passage dim and tremulous

That clasped him in from day and night's pursuit,

He travelled led by a mysterious sound.

A murmur, multitudinous and lone,

All sounds it was in turn, yet still the same.  

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A hidden call to unforeseen delight

In the summoning voice of one long-known and loved,

But nameless to the unremembering mind,

It led to rapture back the truant heart.

The immortal cry ravished the captive ear;

Then, lowering its imperious mystery,

It sank to a whisper circling round the soul.

It seemed the yearning of a lonely flute

That roamed along the shores of memory

And filled the eyes with tears of longing joy.

A cricket's rash and fiery single note,

It marked with shrill melody night's moonless hush

And beat upon a nerve of mystic sleep

Its high insistent magical reveille.

A jingling silver laugh of anklet bells

Travelled the roads of a solitary heart;

Its dance solaced an eternal loneliness:

An old forgotten sweetness sobbing came.

Or from a far harmonious distance heard

The tinkling pace of a long caravan

It seemed at times, or a vast forest's hymn,

The solemn reminder of a temple gong,

A bee-croon honey-drunk in summer isles

Ardent with ecstasy in a slumberous noon,

Or the far anthem of a pilgrim sea.

An incense floated in the quivering air,

A mystic happiness trembled in the breast

As if the invisible Beloved had come

Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face

And close glad hands could seize his fugitive feet

And the world change with the beauty of a smile.

Into a wonderful bodiless realm he came,

The home of a passion without name or voice,

A depth he felt answering to every height,

A nook was found that could embrace all worlds,

A point that was the conscious knot of space,

An hour eternal in the heart of Time.

The silent soul of all the world was there:

A Being lived, a Presence and a Power,

A single Person who was himself and all

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And cherished Nature's sweet and dangerous throbs

Transforming all experience to delight;

Intervening in the sorrowful paths of birth

It turned racked falsehood into happy truth;

Its power was to reveal divinity.

Infinit, coeval with the mind of God,

It bore within itself a seed, a flame,

A seed from which the Eternal is new-born,

A flame that cancels death in mortal things.

All grew to all kindred and self and near,

The intimacy of God was everywhere,

No veil was felt, no brute barrier inert,

Distance could not divide. Time could not change.

A fire of passion burned in spirit-depths,

A constant touch of sweetness linked all hearts,

The throb of one adoration's single bliss

In a rapt ether of undying love.

An inner happiness abode in all,

A sense of universal harmonies,

A measureless secure eternity

Of truth and beauty and good and joy made one.

There was the welling core of finite life;

A formless spirit became the soul of form.

     All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff:

A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.

All here was known by a spiritual sense:

Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one

Seized on all things by a moved identity,

A sympathy of self with other selves,

The touch of consciousness on consciousness

And being's look on being with inmost gaze

And heart laid bare to heart without walls of speech

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And the unanimity of seeing minds

In myriad forms luminous with the one God.

Life was not there, but an impassioned force,

Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps

Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,

A quivering out from soul to answering soul,

A mystic movement, a close influence,

A free and happy and intense approach

Of being to being with no screen or check,

Without which life and love could never have been.

Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,

The soul itself was its own deathless form

And met at once the touch of other souls

Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true.

As when one walks in sleep through luminous dreams

And, conscious, knows the truth their figures mean,

There where reality was its own dream,

He knew things by their soul and not their shape:

As those who have lived long made one in love

For world and self were one reality.

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     Immersed in voiceless internatal trance

Passed were the heavens and hells of their long road;

They had returned into the world's deep soul.

All now was gathered into pregnant rest:

Person and nature suffered a slumber change.

Prophetic of new personality

Arranged the map of their coming destiny's course:

Heirs of their past, their future's discoverers,

Till it can see its truth alive and God.

Once more they must face the problem-game of birth,

The soul's experiment of joy and grief

And thought and impulse lighting the blind act,

Into creation's centre he had come.

The Spirit wandering- from state to state

Finds here the silence of its starting-point

In the formless force and the still fixity

And brooding passion of the world of Soul.

All that is made and once again unmade,

The calm persistent vision of the One

Inevitably re-makes, in lives anew:

Forces and lives and beings and ideas

Are taken into the stillness for a while;

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There they remould their purpose and their drift,

Until their work in cosmic Time is done.

     Here was the fashioning chamber of the worlds.

Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;

Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.

At the beginning of each far-spread plane

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Pervading with her power the cosmic suns

Of whom the world is the inscrutable mask;

The ages are the footfalls of her tread,

Their happenings the figure of her thoughts,

And all creation is her endless act.

His spirit was made a vessel of her force,

Mute in the fathomless passion of his will

He outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer.

Then in a sovereign answer to his heart

A gesture came as of worlds thrown away,

And from her raiment's lustrous mystery raised

One arm half-parted the eternal veil.

A light appeared still and imperishable.

Attracted to the large and luminous depths

Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes,

He saw the mystic outline of a face.

Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,

An atom of her illimitable self

Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power,

Tossed towards the shores of her ocean ecstasy,

Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine,

He cast from the rent stillness of his soul

A cry of adoration and desire

And the surrender of his boundless mind

And the self-giving of his silent heart.

He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone.

END OF CANTO FOURTEEN

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