I felt it all, and came and knelt beside her,
The electric touch solved both our souls together;
Then came the feeling which unmakes, undoes;
Which tears the sea-like soul up by the roots,
And lashes it in scorn against the skies.
* * * * *
It is the saddest and the sorest sight,
One's own love weeping. But why call on God?
But that the feeling of the boundless bounds
All feeling; as the welkin does the world;
It is this which ones us with the whole and God.
Then first we wept; then closed and clung together;
And my heart shook this building of my breast
Like a live engine booming up and down;
She fell upon me like a snow-wreath thawing.
Never were bliss and beauty, love and woe,
Ravelled and twined together into madness,
As in that one wild hour to which all else
The past is but a picture. That alone
Is real, and forever there in front.
* * * * *
* * * After that I left her,
And only saw her once again alive.
"Mother Saint Perpetua, the superior of the convent, was a tall woman,
of about forty years, dressed in dark gray serge, with a long rosary
hanging at her girdle.
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