way. Being flame, the spirit is the storm that "storms the heavens" and "hunts down God" (180). The spirit chases, drives the soul to get underway to where it leads the way. The spirit carries it over into strangeness. "Something strange is the soul on the earth." The soul is the gift of the spirit—the spirit animates. But the soul in turn guards the spirit, so essentially that without the soul the spirit can presumably never be spirit. The soul "feeds" the spirit. How? How else than by investing the spirit with the flame that is in the soul's very nature? This flame is the glow of melancholy, "the patience of the lonely soul" (51).

Solitude does not separate in the kind of dispersion to which all mere forsakenness is exposed. Solitude carries the soul toward the One and only, gathers it into the One, and so starts its being out on its journey. Solitary, the soul is a wanderer. The ardor of its core is charged to carry on its journey the burden of fate—and so to carry the soul toward the spirit.

Lend your flame to the spirit, ardent and heavy heart;

so begins the poem "To Lucifer,"' in other words, the poem to the light-bearer who casts the shadow of evil (posthumous volume, Salzburg edition, p. 14).

The soul's heavy heart glows only when the wandering soul enters into the farthest reaches of its essential being—its wandering nature. That happens when the soul looks toward the face of the blue and beholds its radiance. In that seeing it is "the great soul."

O pain, thou flaming vision
Of the great soul!

(Thunderstorm, 175)

The soul"s greatness takes its measure from its capacity to achieve the flaming vision by which the soul becomes at home in pain. The nature of pain is in itself converse.

"Flaming"' pain tears away. Pain's rending, sweeping force consigns the wandering soul into that conjunction of storm and hunt which would storm heaven and hunt down God.