At length the master rose and said, "Malcolm, I'm
going in: I should like you to stay here half an hour alone, and
then go straight home to bed."
For the master believed in solitude and silence. Say rather, he
believed in God. What the youth might think, feel, or judge, he
could not tell; but he believed that when the Human is still, the
Divine speaks to it, because it is its own.
Malcolm consented willingly. The darkness had deepened, the graves
all but vanished; an old setting moon appeared, boatlike over
a great cloudy chasm, into which it slowly sank; blocks of cloud,
with stars between, possessed the sky; all nature seemed thinking
about death; a listless wind began to blow, and Malcolm began to
feel as if he were awake too long, and ought to be asleep--as
if he were out in a dream--a dead man that had risen too soon or
lingered too late--so lonely, so forsaken! The wind, soft as it
was, seemed to blow through his very soul. Yet something held him,
and his half hour was long over when he left the churchyard.
As he walked home, the words of a German poem, a version of which
Mr Graham had often repeated to him, and once more that same night,
kept ringing in his heart:
Uplifted is the stone,
And all mankind arisen!
We men remain thine own,
And vanished is our prison!
What bitterest grief can stay
Before thy golden cup,
When earth and life give way,
And with our Lord we sup.
To the marriage Death doth call.
The maidens are not slack;
The lamps are burning all--
Of oil there is no lack.
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