Life & Wisdom Quote by George William Russell

A. E. is staging a confession that doubles as a small act of aesthetic rebellion: the soul, he admits, has been most legible to him when it is wounded. The line turns on an almost paradoxical intimacy - “Spirit of my spirit” is not a distant God but an inner presence, a higher self braided into the self that speaks. That closeness makes the apology bite. He is not begging pardon for sin so much as for a skewed spiritual literacy: he has trained his attention on grief because grief speaks in a clearer, harsher alphabet.

The phrasing is carefully weighted. “Read the mystery” treats emotion like scripture, but not the tidy kind. Tears are a text with smudged ink, sorrow a teacher that provides “understanding” more reliably than happiness ever did. The subtext is a critique of easy piety and upbeat transcendence: joy can be noisy, self-congratulatory, even evasive; sorrow strips the ego down to something that can actually listen. In that sense, the sentence is both devotional and suspicious of devotion’s sunnier stereotypes.

Context matters. Russell moved in the Irish Literary Revival and Theosophical circles where mystical insight, symbolism, and inward vision were cultural currency, not private eccentricity. His Ireland also knew political upheaval and communal loss; sorrow was not an abstract mood but a public climate. The line’s intent is to dignify that climate without romanticizing it: he “found it easier,” not nobler. The remorse suggests a desire to graduate to a spirituality mature enough to meet joy with the same seriousness he grants pain.