Chapter 30: The Installation of a Twin-Soul (Continued)

While priest and priestess were folded with mutual emotion two of the loveliest souls took the place of the high priest and priestess on the silver pavement. The girl was young and tender, golden white in complexion with crimson lips. Her figure was swathed in a vermilion robe, on the breast of which was embroidered in outline a sea-green sun whose swaying rays reached the furthest parts of her garment. Her pale blue hair was crowned with a chaplet of daffodils. The youth wore a robe of scarlet silk embroidered with a golden sun similar in design to that of the priestess. His pose was singularly noble. These two souls were about to become priest and priestess, and, after having taken the vows of hopeless love in presence of the goddess, high priest and priestess and congregation of twin-souls, they sang the following anthem, accompanied by a wailing storm of music from several hundred violins, entitled:

THE TWIN-SOUL.

PRIEST.

Love is a heated furnace that devours

The thickest ice; love is a sweet moist wind

That cools the fevered desert with its balm.

There is no rain nor heat, yea, even snow

Is warm and rosy to ideal souls

That shudder in life’s sweetest ecstasies.

If love, that makes ideal life, that dwells

In fragrant silences, makes green the grass,

And far more tender the diviner flowers,

It surely makes both bold and delicate

The warm superiority of flesh

Of that strange, sacred soul that dwells with mine.

The clear, yet golden whiteness of the form

That shines through pale green diaphane,

Showing its pliant beauty, is the dress

Of that rapt soul that is all tenderness.

Her brow is crowned with wistful daffodils,

Making her fair face fairer, and her eyes

Are clouded sapphires; yea, her perfect lips

(Whereon my soul will dwell for evermore)

Clear blood-red rubies! The sweet hand holds

Red poppies and blue lotus, and the soft

And sulphur blossomed wind flower. If such dress

Enshrine a soul as perfect, if the curves

That make her form voluptuous describe

The splendor of her soul (and this I know),

Love has no purer temple, nor more sweet!

The priest had sung alone so far, and now both priest and priestess joined their voices in a marvellous song. Wilder, sweeter and more intense, the violins stormed and wailed pathetic whirlwinds of ecstasy. At times their insufferable moans caught the excited hearts of the audience, and twin-souls in their passion would rise on their wings and, revolving, sweep around the amphitheatre locked in each other’s arms.

PRIEST AND PRIESTESS.

Sharper than pain, we love, and the caress,

Keener than torment, overmaddens us!

There is no fasting when our feverish lips

Meet in the shock that strikes the spirit dumb

With swooning raptures! The dilated soul,

Intemperate with the enormous moan

Of passion, would outleap the strenuous will.

The flesh, transfigured with the crisis, reels,

Stretches the chain of duty and would leap

To grasp the tempting and forbidden fruit,

Were not that virtue is our comrade now.

We lift our eager faces to the sun

And feast on life and in each other’s souls

Luxuriate, confounded with delight.

For us no mouldy cloister waits its prey,

Nor cave of darkness, where existence mourns

And dies beneath its scourgings. We have made

Our grim novitiate with reality.

Have known its agony, for we were born

So eminent for rapture, that the pain

All men inherit desolated us

And spread a living terror in our souls;

So that through clouds of everlasting woe

Scarce came the gleam of gladness or of love,