It had its origin in the reading of history, and the fronting of old tyranny in its cruel forms. Thyrsis had come to hate Christianity for many things by that time, but most of all he hated it because it taught the bastard virtue of Obedience. Thyrsis obeyed no man—he lived his life; and the fiery ardor with which he lived it was taking form in his mind as a personality. He was dreaming a hero who should be Resistance incarnate; the passionate assertion of man’s right and of man’s defiance.
It was in the days of ferocity in Italy, the days of the despot and the bravo; and Thyrsis’ hero was a minstrel, a mighty musician whose soul was free. And he sung in the despot’s hall, and wooed the despot’s daughter. This was the minstrel of “Zulieka”—
“His ladder of song was slight,
But it reached to her window’s height;
Each verse so frail was the silken rail,
From which her soul took flight.”
Thyrsis went about quite drunk with the burning words with which the minstrel won the lady, and tore her free from the mockeries of convention, and that divinity that doth hedge about a princess. He bore her away, locked tightly in his arms, and all his own—into the great lonely mountains; and there lived the minstrel and the princess, the lord and the lady of an outlaw band. But the outlaws were cruel, and the minstrel sought goodness; and so there was a struggle, and he and the lady went yet deeper into the black forest, where they dwelt alone in a hut, he a prince of hunters and she a princess of love. But the outlaws led the despot to the place, and there was a battle; the princess was slain, and the minstrel escaped in the darkness. All night he roamed the forest, and in the morning he lay by the roadside with a bow in his hand, and when the despot rode by he rose and drove the shaft through his heart. Then they captured him, and tortured him, and he died with a song of mockery and defiance upon his lips.
Section 16. Now, when these things first came to Thyrsis, he whispered in awe that it would be a life-time before he could write them. And a year passed thus, while every emotion of his life poured itself into some part of that story, and every note of music that he heard came out of the minstrel’s heart. At last the time came when he was so full of it that he could no longer find peace; when the wonder of it was such that he walked along the street laughing, and with tears in his eyes. Then he said to himself, “It must be done! Now! Now!” And he looked about him as a woman might, seeking some place for her labor.
That was in the late winter, when the professors at the university, and all his relatives and acquaintances, had given him up as a hopeless case. He had stopped all his writing for money—he had a hundred dollars laid by, and that would suffice him; and he was wandering about whispering to himself: “The spring-time! The spring-time! For it must be in the country!” When April had come he could stand it no longer—he must go! So he left all behind him, and set out for a place in the wilderness.
When he reached it, he found a lake that was all ice, and mountains that were all snow; the country people, who had never seen a poet, and knew not the subtle difference between inspiration and insanity, heard with wonder that he was going out into the woods. But he set out alone, through the snowy forest and along the lake-shore, to find some place far away, where he could build a hut, or even put up a tent; and when he was miles from the village, he came suddenly on a little wonderland that made his heart leap like the wild deer in the brake. Here was a dreamland palace, a vision beyond all thinking—a little shanty built of logs! It stood in a pretty dell, with a mountain streamlet dashing through it, and the mighty forest hiding it, and the lake spread out in front of it. It was all wet snow, and freezing rain, and mud and desolation; but Thyrsis saw the summer that was to be, and he sat down upon a stone and gazed at it, and laughed and sang for wonder and joy.
Then he fled back to the village, and found the owner of the earthly rights to this paradise, and hired it for a little gold; and then he moved out, in spite of the snow. At last his soul was free!
Twice a week they brought him provisions, and there he stayed. At first he nearly froze at night, and he had to write with his gloves on; but he did not feel the cold, because of the fire within. He climbed the mountains and yelled with the mad wind, and tramped through the bare, rocking forest, singing his minstrel songs. And all these days he walked with God, and there was no world at all save the world of nature. Millions of young-hearted things sprang up out of the ground to welcome him; the forests shook out their dazzling sheen, and the wild birds went mad in the mornings. All the time Thyrsis was writing, writing—thrilling with his ecstasy, and pouring out all his soul. He kept a little diary these days, and for weeks there was but one entry—“The book! The book!”
And then one day came a letter from his mother, saying that she was coming to the village nearby to spend the summer; also that Corydon’s mother was coming, and that Corydon would be with her!
BOOK II. THE SNARE
The streamlet tinkled on. She sat, gazing about her at each familiar tree and rock. And meanwhile he was reading again from the book—
“Here, too, our shepherd-pipes we first assay’d!”
“Is that from ‘Thyrsis’?” she asked. “Read me those lines that we used, to love so much.”
And so he turned the page, and read again—
“A fugitive and gracious light he seeks,
Shy to illumine; and I seek it, too.
This does not come with houses or with gold,
With place, with honor, and a flattering crew:
’Tis not in the world’s market bought and sold—
But the smooth-slipping weeks
Drop by, and leave its seeker still untired;
Out of the heed of mortals he is gone,
He wends unfollow’d, he must house alone;
Yet on he fares, by his own heart inspired.”
Section 1. On the train Corydon was writing a letter to a friend, to say where she was going, and that Thyrsis was there. “I don’t expect to see anything of him,” she wrote. “He grows more egotistical and more contemptuous every day, and I cordially dislike him.”
But when a man has spent three or four weeks with no company save the squirrels and the owls, there comes over him a mood of sociability, when the sight of a friendly face is an event. Thyrsis had now written several chapters of his book, and the first fury of his creative impulse had spent itself. So when Corydon stepped from the train, she found him waiting there to greet her; and he told her that he was laying in supplies for a feast, and that on the morrow she and her mother were to come out and see his fairy-palace and have a picnic dinner.
They came; and the May put on her finest raiment for their greeting. The sun shone warm and bright, and there was a humming and stirring in grass and thicket; one could feel the surge of the spring-time growth as a living flood. There was a glory of young green over the hill-sides, and a quivering sheen of white in the aspens and birches. Corydon clasped her hands and cried out in rapture when she saw it.
And Thyrsis, picturesque in his old corduroy trousers and his grey flannel shirt, played the host. He showed them his domestic establishment—wherein things were set in order for the first time