But, as I have said, I had my consolations--Lizzie's letters,
my books, a walk to Hampstead Heath on a holiday, an occasional peep
into Goethe or Schiller on a bright day in St. Lawrence Pountney
church-yard, to which I managed to get admittance; and, will you believe
it? going to a city church on Sundays. More of this anon. So that, if I
was in hell for my sins, it was at least not one of Swedenborg's hells.
Never before did I understand what yet I had always considered one of
the most exquisite sonnets I knew:
"Mourner, that dost deserve thy mournfulness,
Call thyself punished, call the earth thy hell;
Say, 'God is angry, and I earned it well;
'I would not have him smile and not redress.'
Say this, and straightway all thy grief grows less.
'God rules at least, I find, as prophets tell,
'And proves it in this prison.' Straight thy cell
Smiles with an unsuspected loveliness.
--'A prison--and yet from door and window-bar,
'I catch a thousand breaths of his sweet air;
'Even to me, his days and nights are fair;
'He shows me many a flower, and many a star;
'And though I mourn, and he is very far,
'He does not kill the hope that reaches there.'"
"Where did you get that wonderful sonnet?" I cried, hardly interrupting
him, for when he came to the end of it, he paused with a solemn pause.
"It is one of the stars of the higher heavens which I spied through my
prison-bars.
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