"Another burst of fire. A brief ecstasy which confounded earth and heaven. Then ashes everywhere. And amid the wreck--like the smoke pillared over Sodom--mantled in darkness as in a magnific pall which turned to grey the blackness of the night--pity mingled with judgment in the intense meditation in which his gaze was fixed--HE stood before me. I fell helpless at His feet. He spoke:
'The judgment is past; dispensed to every man as though he alone were its object. _Thy_ sin has been the love of earth. Thou hast preferred the finite to the infinite--the fleshly joys to the spiritual. Be this choice thy punishment. Thou art shut out from the heaven of spirit. The earth is thine for ever.'"
"My first impulse was one of delighted gratitude. 'All the wonders--the treasures of the natural world, are _mine_?'"
"'Thine,' the Vision replied,'if such shows suffice thee; if thou wilt exchange eternity for the equivalent of a single rose, flung to thee over the barrier of that Eden from which thou art for ever excluded.'"
"'Not so,' I answered. 'If the beauties of nature are thus deceptive, my choice shall be with Art--art which imparts to nature the value of human life. I will seek man's impress in statuary, in painting....'"
"'Obtain that,' the Vision again rebuked me, 'the one form with its single act, the one face with its single look: the failure and the shame of all true artists who felt the whole while they could only reproduce the part.'"
And again the Vision expatiates on the limited nature of the earthly existence--the limited horizon which reduces man to the condition of the lizard pent up in a chamber in the rock--the destined shattering of the prison wall which will quicken the stagnant sense to the impressions of a hitherto unknown world--the spiritual hunger with which the saints, content in their earthly prison, still hail the certainty of deliverance.
"'Let me grasp at Mind,' I then entreated,--'whirl enraptured through its various spheres. Yet no. I know what thou wilt say. Mind, too, is of the earth; and all its higher inspirations proceed from another world--are recognized as doing so by those who receive them. I will catch no more at broken reeds. I will relinquish the world, and take Love for my portion. I will love on, though love too may deceive me, remembering its consolations in the past, struggling for its rewards in the future.'"