EPILOGUE:  IN PRAISE OF GALLOWAY

Night in the Galloway woods
birds at night
the coming of the dawn
Flood-tide of night
way for the sun
the early bird
full chorus
the butcher’s boy of the woods
the dust of battle
comes the day

PREFACE

There is a certain book of mine which no publisher has paid royalty upon, which has never yet been confined in spidery lines upon any paper, a book that is nevertheless the Book of my Youth, of my Love, and of my Heart.

There never was such a book, and in the chill of type certainly there never will be.  It has, so far as I know, no title, this unpublished book of mine.  For it would need the blood of rubies and the life of diamonds crusted on ivory to set the title of this book.

Mostly I see it in the late night watches, when the twilight verges to the cock-crowing and the universe is silent, stirless, windless, for about the space of one hour.  Then the pages of the book are opened a little; and, as one that reads hungrily, hastily, at the bookstall of an impatient vendor a book he cannot buy, so I scan the idylls, the epics, the dramas of the life of man written in words which thrill me as I read.  Some are fiercely tender, some yearning and unsatisfying, some bitter in the mouth but afterward sweet in the belly.  All are expressed in words so fit and chaste and noble, that each is an immortal poem which would give me deathless fame—­could I, alas! but remember.

Then the morning comes, and with the first red I awake to a sense of utter loss and bottomless despair.  Once more I have clutched and missed and forgotten.  It is gone from me.  The imagination of my heart is left unto me desolate.  Sometimes indeed when a waking bird—­by preference a mavis—­sings outside my window, for a little while after I swim upward out of the ocean of sleep, it seems that I might possibly remember one stanza of the deathless words; or even by chance recapture, like the brown speckled thrush, that “first fine careless rapture” of the adorable refrain.

Even when I arise and walk out in the dawn, as is my custom winter and summer, still I have visions of this book of mine, of which I now remember that the mystic name is “The Book Sealed.”  Sometimes in these dreams of the morning, as I walk abroad, I find my hands upon the clasps.  I touch the binding wax of the seals.  When the first rosy fingers of the dawn point upward to the zenith with the sunlight behind them, sanguine like a maid’s hand held before a lamp, I catch a farewell glimpse of the hidden pages.