--And the hour came.
Once to all things comes their hour. The black column of basalt quivers to
its heart with one keen lightning thrill that vindicates its kin to the
electric flash without; the granite cliff loses one atom from its bald
front, and every other atom quails before the dumb shiver of gravitation
and shifts its place; the breathing, breathless marble, which a sculptor
has rescued from its primeval sleep, and, repeating after God, though with
stammering and insufficient lips, the great drama of Paradise, makes a man
out of dust,--once, once, in the dcadness of its beauty, that marble
thrills with magnetic life, drinks its maker's soul, repeats the Paradisaic
amen, and owns that it is good. Yea, greater miracle of transcendental
truth,--once,--perhaps twice,--the sodden, valueless heart of that old man,
whose gold has sucked out all that made him a man, beats with a pulse of
generous honor; even in the dust of stocks and the ashes of speculation,
amid the howling curses of the poor and the bitter weeping of his own
flesh, once he hears the Voice of God, and all eternity cleaves the earth
at his feet with a glare of truth. Once in her loathsome life, that woman,
brazen with sin and shame, flaunting on the pavement, the scorn and jest of
decency and indecency, the fearful index of corrupt society,--even she has
her hour of softness, when the tiny grass that creeps out from the stones
comes greenly into a spring sunshine, and as with a divine whisper recalls
to her the time before she fell, the unburdened heart, the pure childish
pleasures, the kind look of her dead mother's eye, the clasp of that
sister's arm who passed her but yesterday pallid with disgust and ashamed
to own their sacred birth-tie: then the tide rolls back: the hour is come!
She, too, called a woman, who leads society, and triumphs over caste and
custom with metallic ring and force,--she who forgets the decencies of age
in her shameless attire, and supplies its defects with subterfuges, falser
in heart even than in aspect,--she, about whom cluster men old and young,
applauding with brays of laughter and coarser jeers the rancor of her wit,
as it drops its laughing venom or its sneering sophisms of worldly
wisdom,--even she, when the lights are fled, when the music has ceased from
its own desecration, when the frenzy of wine and laughter mock her in their
dead dregs, when the men who flattered and the women who envied are all
gone,--she recalls one calm eye in the crowd, that stung her with its pure
contemptuous pity, a look not to be shut out with draperies as the stars
are; and even through her soul, harder than the soul of that unowned sister
walking the midnight street beneath the window, since it has ceased to know
the stab of sin or the choking agony of shame,--even through that
world-trodden heart flashes one conscious pang, one glimpse of a possible
heaven and an inevitable hell, one naked and open vision of herself.
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