VI

I might call him A thing divine; for nothing natural I ever saw so noble.

Rosalind was deeply interested in Prospero; and when the Poet and I had talked long and eagerly about him, she often threw into the current some comment or suggestion that gave us quite another and clearer view of his genius and work. But at heart Rosalind's chief interest was in Miranda and Ferdinand. The presence of Prospero had given the island a solemn and far-reaching significance in the geography of the world; Miranda and Ferdinand had left an unfailing and beguiling charm about the place. If we could have known the point where these two fresh and unspoiled natures met, I am confident we should have stayed there by common but unspoken consent. After all our discoveries in this mysterious world, youth and love remain the first and sweetest in our thoughts: there is nothing which takes their place, nothing which imparts their glow, nothing which conveys such deep and beautiful hints of the better things to be. Miranda had known no companionship but her father's, no world but the sea-encircled island, no life but the secluded and eventless existence in that wave-swept solitude. She had had the rare good fortune to ripen under the spell of pure, high thoughts, and so near to Nature that no grosser currents of influence had borne her away from the most wholesome and consoling of all companionships. Ferdinand came from the shows of royalty and small falsities of courtiers; the palace, the city, the crowded, self-seeking, hypocritical world had encompassed him from youth, robbed him of privacy, cheated him of that repose which brings a man to a knowledge of himself, and despoils him of those sweet and tranquillising memories which grow out of a quiet childhood as the wild flowers spring along the edges of the woods.

Coming, one from the stillness of a solitary island and the other from the roar and rush of a court and a city, these two met, and there flashed from one to the other that sudden and thrilling intelligence which on the instant gives life a new interpretation and the world an all-conquering loveliness. Nowhere, surely, has the eternal romance found more significant setting than on this magical island, about which sea and sky, day and night, weave and weave again those vanishing webs of splendour in which day-break and evening stars are snared; with such music throbbing on the air as invisible spirits make when the command of the master is on them! Here, surely, was the home of this drama of the soul, the acting of which on the troubled stage of life is a perpetual appeal to faith and hope and joy! For youth and love are shining words in the vocabulary of the Imagination—words which contain the deepest of present and predict the sweetest of future happiness. So deeply interwoven is the real significance of these words with the Imagination that, separated from it, they lose all their magical glow and beauty. Youth moves in no narrow territory; its boundary lines fade out into infinity. It feels no iron hand of limitation; it discerns no impassable wall of restriction. Life stretches away before and about it limitless as space and full of unseen splendours as the stars that crowd and brighten it. The great wings of hope, unbruised yet by any beatings of the later tempests, shine through the air, lustrous and tireless, as if all flights were possible. And far off, on the remote horizon lines where sight fails, the mirage of dreams dissolves and reappears in a thousand alluring forms.

Love knows even less of limitation and infirmity. Its eyes, sometimes oblivious of the things most obvious, pierce the remotest future, read the innermost soul, discern the last and highest fruitions. The seed in its hand, hard, black, unbroken, is already a flower to its thought; out of the bare, stern facts of the present its magical touch brings one knows not what of joy and loveliness. And when youth and love are one, the heavens are not bright enough for their thoughts, nor eternity long enough for their deeds. Amid the shadows of life they seem to have caught a momentary radiance from beyond the clouds; amid sorrows and sins and all manner of weariness they are the recurring vision and revelation of the eternal order. All the world waits on them and rejoices in them; and the bitter knowledge of what lies before the eager feet, waiting with passionate hope on the threshold, does not lessen the perennial interest in that fair picture; for in youth and love are realised the universal ideals of men. Youth and love are the mortal synonyms of immortality; all that freshness of spirit, buoyancy of strength, energy of hope, boundlessness of joy, completeness and glory of life, imply, are typified in these two things, always vanishing and yet always reappearing among men. Wearing the beautiful masks of youth and love, the gods continually revisit the earth, and in their luminous presence faith forever rebuilds its shattered temples.

That which makes youth and love so precious to us is the play they give to the Imagination; indeed, the better part of them both is compounded of Imagination. The horizons recede from their gaze because the second sight of Imagination is theirs—that prescience which pierces the mists which enfold us, and discerns the vaster world through which we move for the most part with halting feet and blinded eyes. Youth knows that it was born to life and power and exhaustless resources; love knows that it has found and shall forever possess those beautiful ideals which are the passion of noble natures.

Are they blind, these flower-crowned, joy-seeking figures; or are we blind who smile through tears at their illusions? On this island there is but one answer to that question; for do we not know that they only who believe and trust discern the truth, and that to faith and hope alone is true vision given? "As yet lingers the twelfth hour and the darkness, but the time will come when it shall be light, and man will awaken from his lofty dreams and find—his dreams all there, and that nothing is gone save his sleep."

THE END