Page:Arthur Machen, The Secret Glory, 1922.djvu/185

The Secret Glory

"'My sin was found out, and when the old women on the bridge pointed at me I was ashamed;

I was deeply grieved when the boys shouted rebukes as I went from Caer-Newydd.

How is it that I was not ashamed before the Finger of the Almighty?

I did not suffer agony at the rebuke of the Most High.

The fist of Rhys Fawr is more dreadful to me than the hand of God.'

"He means, I think, that our great loss is that we separate what is one and make it two; and then, having done so, we make the less real into the more real, as if we thought the glass made to hold wine more important than the wine it holds. And this is what I had felt, for it was only twice that I had known wonders in my body, when I saw the Cup of Telio sant and when the mountains appeared in vision, and so, as the Bard says, the door is shut. The life of bodily things is hard, just as the wineglass is hard. We can touch it and feel it and see it always before us. The wine is drunk and forgotten; it cannot be held. I believe the air about us is just as substantial as a mountain or a cathedral, but unless we remind ourselves we think of the air as nothing. It is not hard. But now I was in Paradise, for body and soul were molten in one fire and went up in one flame. The mortal and the immortal vines were made one. Through the joy of the

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