A Reckless Character, and Other Stories Part 42

Thou art very beautiful--and no one can tell whether thou prizest thy beauty or not.--Thou art devoid of sympathy thyself and demandest no sympathy.

Thy gaze is profound, and not thoughtful; emptiness lies in that bright depth.

Thus do the stately shades pa.s.s by without grief and without joy in the Elysian Fields, to the dignified sounds of Gluck's melodies.

November, 1879.

STAY!

Stay! As I now behold thee remain thou evermore in my memory!

From thy lips the last inspired sound hath burst forth--thine eyes do not gleam and flash, they are dusky, weighted with happiness, with the blissful consciousness of that beauty to which thou hast succeeded in giving expression,--of that beauty in quest of which thou stretchest forth, as it were, thy triumphant, thine exhausted hands!

What light, more delicate and pure than the sunlight, hath been diffused over all thy limbs, over the tiniest folds of thy garments?

What G.o.d, with his caressing inflatus, hath tossed back thy dishevelled curls?

His kiss burneth on thy brow, grown pale as marble!

Here it is--the open secret, the secret of poetry, of life, of love!

Here it is, here it is--immortality! There is no other immortality--and no other is needed.--At this moment thou art deathless.

I will pa.s.s,--and again thou art a pinch of dust, a woman, a child....

But what is that to thee!--At this moment thou hast become loftier than all transitory, temporal things, thou hast stepped out of their sphere.--This _thy_ moment will never end.

Stay! And let me be the sharer of thy immortality, drop into my soul the reflection of thine eternity!

November, 1879.

THE MONK

I used to know a monk, a hermit, a saint. He lived on the sweetness of prayer alone,--and as he quaffed it, he knelt so long on the cold floor of the church that his legs below the knee swelled and became like posts. He had no sensation in them, he knelt--and prayed.

I understood him--and, perhaps, I envied him; but let him also understand me and not condemn me--me, to whom his joys are inaccessible.

He strove to annihilate himself, his hated _ego_; but the fact that I do not pray does not arise from self-conceit.

My ego is, perchance, even more burdensome and repulsive to me than his is to him.

He found a means of forgetting himself ... and I find a means to do the same, but not so constantly.

He does not lie ... and neither do I lie.

November, 1879.

WE SHALL STILL FIGHT ON!

What an insignificant trifle can sometimes put the whole man back in tune!

Full of thought, I was walking one day along the highway.

Heavy forebodings oppressed my breast; melancholy seized hold upon me.

I raised my head.... Before me, between two rows of lofty poplars, the road stretched out into the distance.

Across it, across that same road, a whole little family of sparrows was hopping, hopping boldly, amusingly, confidently!

One of them in particular fairly set his wings akimbo, thrusting out his crop, and twittering audaciously, as though the very devil was no match for him! A conqueror--and that is all there is to be said.

But in the meantime, high up in the sky, was soaring a hawk who, possibly, was fated to devour precisely that same conqueror.

I looked, laughed, shook myself--and the melancholy thoughts instantly fled. I felt daring, courage, a desire for life.

And let _my_ hawk soar over _me_ if he will....

"We will still fight on, devil take it!"

November, 1879.

PRAYER

No matter what a man may pray for he is praying for a miracle.--Every prayer amounts to the following: "Great G.o.d, cause that two and two may not make four."

Only such a prayer is a genuine prayer from a person to a person. To pray to the Universal Spirit, to the Supreme Being of Kant, of Hegel--to a purified, amorphous G.o.d, is impossible and unthinkable.

But can even a personal, living G.o.d with a form cause that two and two shall not make four?

Every believer is bound to reply, "He can," and is bound to convince himself of this.

But what if his reason revolts against such an absurdity?

In that case Shakspeare will come to his a.s.sistance: "There are many things in the world, friend Horatio...." and so forth.