For the benefit of any person who does not know it, I may
mention two cases taken from memory. I have not the book by me, so I can
only render the poetical passages in a clumsy paraphrase. But there was
one poem of which the image was so vast that it was literally difficult
for a time to take it in; he was describing the evening earth with its
mist and fume and fragrance, and represented the whole as rolling
upwards like a smoke; then suddenly he called the whole ball of the
earth a thurible, and said that some gigantic spirit swung it slowly
before God. That is the case of the image too large for comprehension.
Another instance sticks in my mind of the image which is too small. In
one of his poems, he says that abyss between the known and the unknown
is bridged by "Pontifical death." There are about ten historical and
theological puns in that one word. That a priest means a pontiff, that a
pontiff means a bridge-maker, that death is certainly a bridge, that
death may turn out after all to be a reconciling priest, that at least
priests and bridges both attest to the fact that one thing can get
separated from another thing--these ideas, and twenty more, are all
actually concentrated in the word "pontifical.
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