people, gross good things were
coming to overwhelm me with benedictions for which I had not bargained.
Great oxen and camels and concubines were panting close behind me,
he-goats and she-goats and rams of the breed of Bashan. My barns should
burst their doors with plenty, and all my paths drop fatness. My face
should be smeared with the oil of rejoicing; all my household and the
beasts of my household should beget and bear increase; and as for the
fruit of my own loins, it should be for multitude as the sands of the
sea and as the stars of heaven. My little ones should be as olive plants
around my table; sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters to the
third and fourth generation, should rise up and call me blessed. My feet
should be dipped in butter, and my eyes stand out with fatness; I should
flourish as the Cedar of Lebanon that bringeth forth fruit in old age.

THE SONNET

It came back to me this rainy afternoon for no reason, the memory of
another afternoon long ago in the country, when, at the end of an autumn
day, I had stood at the rain-dashed window and gazed out at the dim
landscape; and as I watched the yellowing leaves blown about the garden,
I had seen a flock of birds rise above the half-denuded poplars and
wheel in the darkening sky. I had felt there was a mysterious meaning in
that moment, and in that flight of dim-seen birds an augury of ill-omen
for my life. It was a mood of Autumnal, minor-poet melancholy, a mood
with which, it had occurred to me, I might fill out the rhymes of a
lugubrious sonnet.

But my Sonnet about those birds--those Starlings, or whatever they
were--will, I fear, never be written now. For how can I now recapture
the sadness, the self-pity of youth?

Alas! What do the compensations of age after all amount to? What joy can
the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they take away?

WELTANSCHAUUNG

When, now and then, on a calm night I look up at the Stars, I reflect on
the wonders of Creation, the unimportance of this Planet, and the
possible existence of other worlds like ours. Sometimes it is the
self-poised and passionless shining of those serene orbs which I think
of; sometimes Kant's phrase comes into my mind about the majesty of the
Starry Heavens and the Moral Law; or I remember Xenophanes gazing at the
broad firmament, and crying, 'All is One!' and thus, in that sublime
exclamation, enunciating for the first time the great doctrine of the