And on that last day she would let it go, as a hare is let go a
furlong beyond a greyhound. Then it would fly like a windy shadow
from glade to glade, or from dune to dune, in the vain hope to reach a
wayside Calvary: but ever in vain. Sometimes the Holy Tree would almost
be reached; then, with a gliding swiftness, like a flood racing down a
valley, the Walker in the Night would be alongside the fugitive. Now and
again unhappy nightfarers--unhappy they, for sure, for never does weal
remain with any one who hears what no human ear should hearken--would be
startled by a sudden laughing in the darkness. This was when some such
terrible chase had happened, and when the creature of the night had
taken the captive soul, in the last moments of the last hour of the last
day of its possible redemption, and rent it this way and that, as a hawk
scatters the feathered fragments of its mutilated quarry."
We have said that nature may be either an intoxication or a sacrament,
and paganism might be defined as the view of nature in the former of
these two lights. But where you have a growing spirituality like that of
William Sharp, you are constantly made aware of the hieratic or
sacramental quality in nature also.
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