I
In a room in an hotel of the south some one was lying ill. It was March, and an airless, parching heat lay outside, the palms drooped yellow leaves, the bee-eaters chattering on a carob-bush dived luxuriantly into corn so green that they were in no wise distinguished from it; they turned and fluttered like butterflies, and from the bronze wing  feathers a sheen of gold rippled over their emerald in the sun.
Inside the room was as cool as it might be; when, from time to time, the shutters were opened the glory of gold and green outside flashed into sight. Outside life was heavy with heat, luxuriant, substantial; bounded, limited and weighed down by its very fullness.
Inside life had dwindled to a thin thread of consciousness, or rather it seemed like two strands worn nearly to breaking lying side by side. The one, the actual physical consciousness of a corporal life ebbing, of breath drawn with difficulty; of physical sensation not perhaps actually painful, but almost altogether wearying—a consciousness  close to that mysterious land of delusions, where the physical symptoms are set apart from the personal consciousness and become external antagonistic forces. It was not intolerable because it was becoming a thing more and more external, more separate from that other spiritual consciousness with which it was still lightly entwined.
And that other thread of being, how shall one describe it? It was not quite continuous, for now and again the physical sensation numbed it; now and then, when times of refreshment came, the other like a stream rose and engulfed it.
Compare that old image of the Rhone and the Saone. The one flows on, blue, clear, transparent; the other side by side, turbulent, muddy and swift. The man lying here seemed to himself to be both, but most of all the clearer thinner stream. The turbulence, the force of the other is daily less and less himself, more and more an alien power to which he yet jealously clings in the body of this death, and will not, cannot part from it.
And from time to time comes a new impulse of the stronger torrent—its yellowing waters tinge the blue—it is fuller, and there is a sense of well-being; and yet that transparent river of spiritual being, clear as crystal, has been sullied, it has disappeared.
Such little trivial things too will  give him back the life which is his power and his bondage;—the cup of iced coffee, that he looks for and can drink when other food nauseates, this makes him feel that he lives again and yet kills that clearer, sweeter, finer, life;—as much, in a sense, as overpowering bodily discomfort kills it—more, perhaps, for the more it overpowers the more external it is, the less it is himself.
If only he can keep from fear, for that kills all. And yet this thread of consciousness, which I have called spiritual, is not thinking any thought, it is seeing visions, and these visions are not of another world but of the sweeter, purer things of this world, transfigured and serene. He is a child  again in a Cornish lane, and the grass is deep and dewy, the banks are high, crowned with little bushes nearly bare of leaf, for it is spring; deep in the grass are primroses, long stalked and growing by the handful, you can thrust your hand into the damp grass, rich in little ferns and unnamed leaves, and pluck them so; between the primroses there are violets—are they purple or grey or blue?—and here and there a celandine, golden yellow. Or he is a boy sitting on a rock; his feet are bare, the sea is shallow round him, the ripples run out, and the sun shining through them laces the fine sand below with gold. He tells the nurses that as soon as he is well he will go to the sea and dip his feet in it.
 
Then he thinks of music that he knows, and it comes with unutterable sweetness of cadence like music heard in dreams.
And this radiance lies not only on things imagined but on things seen. The roses brought into the room are the roses of Dorothea; the scent of the palm, in blossom outside, fills the room with an ethereal fragrance; and oh, those clusters of waxen palm flowers that his friends bring in and place in the green jug, surely it must come from that tree whose very leaves are for the healing of the nations!
It is only at night that the horror comes—no nameless horror, but the horror of fighting with the darkness;  it is hot, and it stifles. The doctors have been, and he knows their report is not good though no one has told him so. The medicine bottles begin to change; there is one like a knight’s head near the candle, he knows it is only a cork in it, but it is very like the armoured head of a knight; and the darkness comes near, it oppresses all, laying a heavy hand on the world: it is too near, too heavy, all round us and weighing on us above.
He sleeps, to shout at the people in the room—he asks the nurse to expel the Arab who is beside the bed. He knows they are not there at all, but he does not want to sleep, for he will wake in that horrible strangle  of breath. It is so long, if only there were any light at all! Weary, interminable length, and some lines of a poem run in his mind:
“An hour or two more and God is so kind
The day will be blue in the window blind.”

“Thank the kind God the carts come in.”
They come in so early in London.—Only an hour or two is quiet in the night, and you would know that the world is alive again, one would not have to keep the darkness long at bay; but here the night is day-long. Brandy—what is the good? The smell is nauseating; but it is at his lips, and he drinks. Has he slept? but it is black and still and dark, the dogs howl and  scuffle past the window. Hours more to come, hours of the blackness. One of these people who is about the room sits down by the bed. She is not terrifying. She is only an old lady with grey hair, but she expects something. She must be told to go away; they will not tell her, and he is angry with urging. But of course she was not really there, it was only a dream; so he must have slept again, and the minutes must have passed.
There is a hint of grey in the sky, the whisper of a breeze in the palm leaves—dawn is coming. Now there is one hour of horror to go through, for the windows must be shut; he cannot breathe—he cannot live like this for an hour. The door into the  passage may be opened, and the nurse’s step falls cold and echoing on the stone outside; no one else is moving, it is all grey and cold; he knows how that empty passage must look. This is better, for the blackness is going.
He sees the palm-trees outside above the muslin blinds; all the world is still and dead, its light gone out, but it can be rekindled. From the other window nothing can be seen but colourless sky, but the sky itself begins to kindle into life.
Suddenly something falls across the muslin blind; a bar, and a dot of sunlight, of that molten gold of Egyptian sunshine before the day has dried it into dust of gold. Oh the extraordinary beauty of that gold! Has  sunshine been always in the world before, and yet we never knew it was like that? The darkness has passed, the light shines, the rapture and the beauty of the light spreads and broadens; the sky is awake, the garden is alive, the night is gone—and now the window towards the south is thrown open, and very faint and fair, a delicate violet light lies on the hills beyond the river. The air is blown in sweet, fragrant, unspeakably pure; and that carob-tree on which the birds sat yesterday is green and fresh, and below is the blue-green of the corn into which they dropped.
An Arab is riding on his camel along the dyke, they are outlined against that purple hill. So people still live and  move outside; they can move then, they can go where they wish. But he sees the sun, and the breath of heaven comes in, and the night is passed. He is tired with this warring against the night, but the light has come and the clearer, brighter river is flowing again. This is day.
What is this land where the spirit has been living? Is it the land of Beulah or the Valley of the Shadow? Which is most real? He knows which is most substantial, but why is it most real? The instrument is more substantial than the melody and infinitely less real. Yet when the veil grows thin which hides the glory of the vision, agonizing we entreat that it may not be removed and show the glory of the face.
 
II
“The luminous
Star-inwrought, beautiful
Folds of the Veil.”
Many have written of the journey down to the dark river; few have told of the road backward from the river’s brink; a road of sudden ecstasies and sordid pitfalls.
For the radiance lay over the earth when he turned his face to it again. Nothing was ever sweeter than the sight of palm leaves against the blue upon the banks of the Nile. As the shores streamed past, with the rosy hills and yellow lights above them,  winged feluccas furling sail, or sweeping like birds across the blue, with the roaring of the swiftness of their motion, he could lie and look—weary with rapture—watching the figures sprung from the old Palestinian story—a rugged Peter wrapping his fisher’s cloak about him, or urging his fellows “I go a-fishing.” But slowly, imperceptibly, the walls of the world closed in again; the sun beat pitilessly down; the heavens were brass, the earth iron. Now and again they would open out at the sight of the sapphire sparkle of the Mediterranean, or the deep, green growth under blossoming orchards of France. The wind became the life-giving breath of the spirit, and the soul would “beat”  against “mortal bars,” seeing infinite power, infinite possibility, lying but just beyond the frail partition; a touch, and he might glide from the mountain side down over the trees that slept in the noonday of the valley; a hand on the eyes, and they would see to the truth that lies beneath form and colour of earthly things; a finger on the ear, and he would hear the very meaning of the wind and of the trickle of the stream—the gift of tongues would be an imaginably natural incident.
Yet next day, at some trifling ailment, death and its terrors compass him about, and the man shakes as with ague under the fear of it and shame of cowardice. Or he wakes every  morning seemingly refreshed, only to fall by midday into a gulf of blackness and mistrust, sordid, not tragic, not dignified; and he sits tongue-tied, seeing a sneer in every smile, marvelling that men do not see the loathsomeness and terror that lie around them, but walk unconcerned among the dangers that encompass. Then again life returns in full flood, and the fears and the terrors are as the fabric of a dream.
A long, strange way, full of inexplicable joys and sorrows, hopes and fears—a far longer path to travel in the spirit than that by which he came “out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt,” to the cool airs and sweet quiet of an old English country house in wooded downs touched by  the freshness of the sea. There in the south, after the first bound towards health, life had stood still; the parched, sapless land could yield dry, clear air, sharp bright sunlight, but no refreshment of health and of spirit, nothing that could be compared to the misty mornings, and soft dewy evenings of a mild English spring. There the spring brings no refreshment; March reaps her harvest and the palm leaves hang dry and yellowish: here all life was stirring after the winter sleep, and earth was striving in her own finite way to make all things new. It was long since he had seen an English spring, and the eye could not be satisfied with gazing.
 
He first noticed it when, looking on the wintry copses, he saw that a thin ripple of life had run over the ground; among brown stalks and withered leaves so slight a flush of green that you could hardly say, “It is here” or “It is there,” nor surely know the change was worked to the outer eye or noted by the reanimate perception. Then the fine veil of skeleton branches against the sky, through, under, beyond which he could see the blue downs of the coast, thickened, and they warmed in colour; till the brown of the elm became purple, and the brown of the beeches red, and the willow golden: then the elm burst into its little purple rosettes but the others stayed. And now crept  out those little silvery creatures which the children call palms; like little downy animals, so sweet, so comfortable that the child must half believe they are alive. Early in April the clumps of crocus in the turf, purple and yellow, were dying, but the daffodils were beginning to take their place, strewing the rough grass with flowers of milky gold. A week later the snake-heads were drawing themselves out of the turf, with head............