He had to awake from the dead and cry for light, and was
soon in the bitter agony of the cataleptic struggle between life and
death.
He thought afterwards, when the time had passed, that surely in this
period of darkness he had been visited and upheld by a power whose
presence and even influence escaped his consciousness. He knew not
how else he could have got through it. Also he remembered that
strange helps had come to him; that the aspects of nature then
wonderfully softened towards him, that then first he began to feel
sympathy with her ways and shows, and to see in them all the working
of a diffused humanity. He remembered how once a hawthorn bud set
him weeping; and how once, as he went miserable to church, a child
looked up in his face and smiled, and how in the strength of that
smile he had walked boldly to the lectern.
He never knew how long he had been in the strange birth agony, in
which the soul is as it were at once the mother that bears and the
child that is born.
CHAPTER XIII.
A REPORT OF PROGRESS.
In the meantime George Bascombe came and went; every visit he showed
clearer notions as to what he was for, and what he was against;
every visit he found Helen more worthy and desirable than
theretofore, and flattered himself he made progress in the
conveyance of his opinions and judgments over into her mind.
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