The story is shortly told in nine lines. The human and the divine love
are rivals here; pagan _versus_ ideal affection. The hunted heart is not
allowed to find refuge or solace in human love. The man knows that it is
Love that follows him: yet it is the warm, red, earthly passion that he
craves for, and the divine pursuer seems cold, exacting, and austere.
Finding no refuge in human love from this "tremendous Lover," he seeks
it next in a kind of imaginative materialism, half-scientific,
half-fantastic. He appeals at "the gold gateways of the stars" and at
"the pale ports o' the moon" for shelter. He seeks to hide beneath the
vague and blossom-woven veil of far sky-spaces, or, in lust of swift
motion, "clings to the whistling mane of every wind!" Here is a choice
of paganism at its most modern and most impressive. The cosmic
imagination, revelling in the limitless fields of time and space, will
surely be sufficient for a man's idealism, without any insistence upon
further definition. Here are Carlyle's Eternities and Immensities--are
they not enough? The answer is that these are but the servants of One
mightier than they.
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