Warlock o Glenwarlock | Page 4

some race used to a richer home; and yet all the
time the frozen regions of the north drew his fancy tenfold more than
Italy or Egypt.
His name was Cosmo, a name brought from Italy by one of the line
who had sold his sword and fought for strangers. Not a few of the
younger branches of the family had followed the same evil profession,
and taken foreign pay--chiefly from poverty and prejudice combined,
but not a little in some cases from the inborn love of fighting that seems
to characterize the Celt. The last soldier of them had served the East
India Company both by sea and land: tradition more than hinted that he
had chiefly served himself. Since then the heads of the house had been
peaceful farmers of their own land, contriving to draw what to many
farmers nowadays would seem but a scanty subsistence from an estate
which had dwindled to the twentieth part of what it had been a few
centuries before, though even then it could never have made its
proprietor rich in anything but the devotion of his retainers.
Growing too hot between the sun and the wall, Cosmo rose, and
passing to the other side of the house beyond the court-yard, and
crossing a certain heave of grass, came upon one unfailing delight in
his lot--a preacher whose voice, inarticulate, it is true, had, ever since
he was born, been at most times louder in his ear than any other. It was
a mountain stream, which, through a channel of rock, such as nearly
satisfied his most fastidious fancy, went roaring, rushing, and
sometimes thundering, with an arrow-like, foamy swiftness, down to
the river in the glen below. The rocks were very dark, and the foam

stood out brilliant against them. From the hill-top above, it came,
sloping steep from far. When you looked up, it seemed to come flowing
from the horizon itself, and when you looked down, it seemed to have
suddenly found it could no more return to the upper regions it had left
too high behind it, and in disgust to shoot headlong to the abyss. There
was not much water in it now, but plenty to make a joyous white rush
through the deep-worn brown of the rock: in the autumn and spring it
came down gloriously, dark and fierce, as if it sought the very centre,
wild with greed after an absolute rest.
The boy stood and gazed, as was his custom. Always he would seek
this endless water when he grew weary, when the things about him put
on their too ordinary look. Let the aspect of this be what it might, it
seemed still inspired and sent forth by some essence of mystery and
endless possibility. There was in him an unusual combination of the
power to read the hieroglyphic internal aspect of things, and the
scientific nature that bows before fact. He knew that the stream was in
its second stage when it rose from the earth and rushed past the house,
that it was gathered first from the great ocean, through millions of
smallest ducts, up to the reservoirs of the sky, thence to descend in
snows and rains, and wander down and up through the veins of the
earth; but the sense of its mystery had not hitherto begun to withdraw.
Happily for him, the poetic nature was not merely predominant in him,
but dominant, sending itself, a pervading spirit, through the science that
else would have stifled him. Accepting fact, he found nothing in its
outward relations by which a man can live, any more than by bread; but
this poetic nature, illuminating it as with the polarized ray, revealed
therein more life and richer hope. All this was as yet however as
indefinite as it was operative in him, and I am telling of him what he
could not have told of himself.
He stood gazing now in a different mood from any that had come to
him before: he had begun to find out something fresh about this same
stream, and the life in his own heart to which it served as a revealing
phantasm. He recognized that what in the stream had drawn him from
earliest childhood, with an infinite pleasure, was the vague sense, for a
long time an ever growing one, of its MYSTERY--the form the infinite
first takes to the simplest and liveliest hearts. It was because it was
ALWAYS flowing that he loved it, because it could not stop: whence it

came was utterly unknown to him, and he did not care to know. And
when at length he learned that it came flowing out of the dark hard
earth, the mystery only grew. He imagined a wondrous cavity below in
black rock, where