Читать книгу The Complete Works of Algernon Blackwood. Novels, Short Stories, Horror Classics, Occult & Supernatural Tales, Plays онлайн

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Or temple keeping in vestal white?

"Ye who regret suns that have set,

Lo, each god of the ages golden,

Here is enshrined, ageless and kind,

Unbeholden the dark years through.

Their faithful oracles yet bestowing,

By laurels whisper and clear streams flowing,

Or the leafy stir of the Gods' own going,

In oak trees blowing, may answer you!"

—From PEREGRINA'S SONG

For the next month Terence O'Malley possessed his soul in patience; he worked, and the work saved him. That is to say it enabled him to keep what men call "balanced." Stahl had—whether intentionally or not he was never quite certain—raised a tempest in him. More accurately, perhaps, he had called it to the top, for it had been raging deep down ever since he could remember, or had begun to think.

That the earth might be a living, sentient organism, though too vast to be envisaged as such by normal human consciousness, had always been a tenet of his imagination's creed. Now he knew it true, as a dinner-gong is true. That deep yearnings, impossible of satisfaction in the external conditions of ordinary life, could know subjective fulfillment in the mind, had always been for him poetically true, as for any other poet: now he realized that it was literally true for some outlying tract of consciousness usually inactive, termed by some transliminal. Spiritual nostalgia provided the channel, and the transfer of consciousness to this outlying tract, involving, of course, a trance condition of the usual self, indicated the way—that was all.