>From that moment he began to be restless, and was more feverish than
usual throughout the night.
Up to this time he had spoken little, was depressed with a suffering
to which he could give no name--not pain, he said--but such that he
could rouse no mental effort to meet it: his endurance was passive
altogether. This night his brain was more affected. He did not
rave, but often wandered; never spoke nonsense, but many words that
would have seemed nonsense to ordinary people: to Robert they seemed
inspired. His imagination, which was greater than any other of his
fine faculties, was so roused that he talked in verse--probably
verse composed before and now recalled. He would even pray
sometimes in measured lines, and go on murmuring petitions, till the
words of the murmur became undistinguishable, and he fell asleep.
But even in his sleep he would speak; and Robert would listen in
awe; for such words, falling from such a man, were to him as dim
breaks of coloured light from the rainbow walls of the heavenly
city.
'If God were thinking me,' said Ericson, 'ah! But if he be only
dreaming me, I shall go mad.'
Ericson's outside was like his own northern clime--dark, gentle, and
clear, with gray-blue seas, and a sun that seems to shine out of the
past, and know nothing of the future. But within glowed a volcanic
angel of aspiration, fluttering his half-grown wings, and ever
reaching towards the heights whence all things are visible, and
where all passions are safe because true, that is divine.
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