Elizabeth Jane Chambers

 

 

I was nineteen years of age when love opened my eyes with its magic rays and touched my spirit for the first time with its fiery fingers, and Mr Chambers was the first man who awakened my spirit with his beauty and led me into his garden of holiness, where days pass like dreams and nights like weddings.

Mr Chambers was the one who taught me to worship beauty by the example of his own beauty and revealed to me the secret of love by his pure affections; he also was the one who first sang to me the poetry of his life.

E very young women remembers her first real love and tries to recapture that strange hour, the memory of which changes her deepest feelings and makes her so happy in spite of all the bitterness of this earthy life of mystery.

In every young women's life there can be "Mr Chambers" who appears to her suddenly while even in the spring of life and transforms her solitude into happy moments and fills the silence of her nights with music and lights up her darkness.

I was deeply engrossed in thought and contemplation and seeking to understand the meaning of nature and the revelation of books and scriptures when I heard LOVE whispered into my ears through Mr Chambers lips. My life was a coma, empty like that of Adam's in Paradise, when I saw Mr Chambers standing before me like a column of light. He was the Adam of my heart who filled it with secrets and wonders and made me understand the true meaning of life.

The first Eve led Adam out of Paradise by her own will, while Mr Chambers who invited me and made me desire to enter willingly into paradise of his pure love and virtue by his goodness and love.

 

When I entered his garden I felt a power pulling me away from this world and placing me in a sphere supernaturally free from struggle and hardship. Like a mystic who receives a revelation of Heaven, I saw myself amid the trees and flowers, and as I approached the entrance of the house I beheld Him sitting on the bench in the shadow of a tree. The beauty of His face was not classic; it was like a dream of revelation which cannot be measured or bound or copied by the brush of a painter or the chisel of a sculptor. His beauty was not in his golden hair,but in the virtue of purity which surrounded it; not in his large eyes, but in the light which emanated from them; not in his lips, but in the sweetness of his words. Nor was it in his strong body, but in the nobility of his spirit, burning like a white torch between earth and heaven. His beauty was like a gift of poetry. He was deeply thoughtful rather than talkative, and his silence was a kind of music that carried one to a world of dreams and made me listen to the throbbing of his heart, and see the spirit of his thoughts and feel breathless standing before him, looking him in the eyes.