ted 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 god, 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 pass,--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 conq