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Then he rose, and rang the Convent bell. On the steps of Warwick Castle stood the Knight and his bride. Their eyes still lingered on the archway through which the noble figure of Symon, Bishop of Worcester, mounted upon his black mare, Shulamite, had just disappeared from view. The marriage had taken place in the Castle chapel, half an hour before, with an astonishing amount of pomp and ceremony.
Professor Granger, who at times comes very near the truth, says: "There is something profoundly philosophical in the use of The Song of Songs to typify the communion of the soul with its ideal. The passion which is expressed by the Shulamite for her earthly lover in such glowing phrases becomes the type of the love of the soul towards God."
Mora had never before seen the man so completely merged in his high office. And, when all was over, even as he mounted Shulamite and rode away, he rode out of the courtyard with the air of a Knight Templar riding forth-to do battle in a Holy War.
In the most beautiful language in the gift of the poets of that day Solomon converses with Naamah in the following dialogue: "Return, return O Shulamite; return, return that we may look upon thee." Naamah, "What will you see in Shulamite?" Solomon, "As it were a company of two armies."
As Mora walked beside him across the sunny lawn, "Father," she said, "think you the heart of a nun can ever become again as the heart of other women?" Back to Worcester rode the Bishop. Gallop! Gallop! along the grassy rides, beside the hard highway. Hasten good Shulamite, black and comely still, though flecked with foam. Important work lies ahead. Every moment is precious.
"And, these three?" asked Rand. "Faith, Hope, and Charity," answered Deb. "Faith is blue, Hope is pink, and that white one is Charity." "She has a purple edge to her gown." "Yes," said Deb, "and I am going to give her a crown, 'for the greatest of these is Charity! That yellow lily is the Shulamite. Miranda and I are going now to gather more ladies." She looked at Rand with large child's eyes.
The country of the Fertile Plain of Sweet Flags was transformed. It suddenly became the land wherein gods grew not singly but in whole forests. Like the Shulamite, when introduced among the jewelled ladies of Solomon's harem, so stood the boor amid the sheen and gold of the new temples.
When he lifted up his voice in "Return, return, O Shulamite, return, return," a long wail in reply, from below a back seat where a shepherd was slumbering, proclaimed that his appeal had not altogether failed.
Africa is personified to him the Cinderella of the continents, the drudge with a destiny worthy of her charms and her good-temper. He is writing a monograph on the Song of Solomon, he tells me. He follows certain scholars in his conjecture that the Shulamite was given back to a humble shepherd by Solomon, when she had conquered the latter by the power of her impassioned chastity.
Yet the quality of their love, if one may say so, is very different from anything Hebrew, or, for the matter of that, Greek or Roman; their ardour is not a transient phenomenon which disturbs them, like that of the Shulamite, or the lover described by Sappho or Plato, but a chief business of their life, as in the case of Dante, of Petrarch, of Francesca and Paolo, or Tristram and Yseult.
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