Dream Tales and Prose Poems Part 33

Every time I pa.s.sed by her she stretched out her little, black, cold hand, and peeped up at me out of her little mournful, almost human eyes. I took her hand, and she ceased whining and moving restlessly about.

There was a dead calm. The sea stretched on all sides like a motionless sheet of leaden colour. It seemed narrowed and small; a thick fog overhung it, hiding the very mast-tops in cloud, and dazing and wearying the eyes with its soft obscurity. The sun hung, a dull red blur in this obscurity; but before evening it glowed with strange, mysterious, lurid light.

Long, straight folds, like the folds in some heavy silken stuff, pa.s.sed one after another over the sea from the ship's prow, and broadening as they pa.s.sed, and wrinkling and widening, were smoothed out again with a shake, and vanished. The foam flew up, churned by the tediously thudding wheels; white as milk, with a faint hiss it broke up into serpentine eddies, and then melted together again and vanished too, swallowed up by the mist.

Persistent and plaintive as the monkey's whine rang the small bell at the stern.

From time to time a porpoise swam up, and with a sudden roll disappeared below the scarcely ruffled surface.

And the captain, a silent man with a gloomy, sunburnt face, smoked a short pipe and angrily spat into the dull, stagnant sea.

To all my inquiries he responded by a disconnected grumble. I was obliged to turn to my sole companion, the monkey.

I sat down beside her; she ceased whining, and again held out her hand to me.

The clinging fog oppressed us both with its drowsy dampness; and buried in the same unconscious dreaminess, we sat side by side like brother and sister.

I smile now ... but then I had another feeling.

We are all children of one mother, and I was glad that the poor little beast was soothed and nestled so confidingly up to me, as to a brother.

_November 1879._

N.N.

Calmly and gracefully thou movest along the path of life, tearless and smileless, and scarce a heedless glance of indifferent attention ruffles thy calm.

Thou art good and wise ... and all things are remote from thee, and of no one hast thou need.

Thou art fair, and no one can say, whether thou prizest thy beauty or not.

No sympathy hast thou to give; none dost thou desire.

Thy glance is deep, and no thought is in it; in that clear depth is emptiness.

So in the Elysian field, to the solemn strains of Gluck's melodies, move without grief or bliss the graceful shades.

_November 1879._

STAY!

Stay! as I see thee now, abide for ever in my memory!

From thy lips the last inspired note has broken. No light, no flash is in thy eyes; they are dim, weighed down by the load of happiness, of the blissful sense of the beauty, it has been thy glad lot to express--the beauty, groping for which thou hast stretched out thy yearning hands, thy triumphant, exhausted hands!

What is the radiance--purer and higher than the sun's radiance--all about thy limbs, the least fold of thy raiment?

What G.o.d's caressing breath has set thy scattered tresses floating?

His kiss burns on thy brow, white now as marble.

This is it, the mystery revealed, the mystery of poesy, of life, of love!

This, this is immortality! Other immortality there is none, nor need be.

For this instant thou art immortal.

It pa.s.ses, and once more thou art a grain of dust, a woman, a child.... But why need'st thou care! For this instant, thou art above, thou art outside all that is pa.s.sing, temporary. This thy instant will never end. Stay!

and let me share in thy immortality; shed into my soul the light of thy eternity!

_November 1879._

THE MONK

I used to know a monk, a hermit, a saint. He lived only for the sweetness of prayer; and steeping himself in it, he would stand so long on the cold floor of the church that his legs below the knees grew numb and senseless as blocks of wood. He did not feel them; he stood on and prayed.

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

He has attained to annihilating himself, his hateful _ego_; but I too; it's not from egoism, I pray not.

My _ego_, may be, is even more burdensome and more odious to me, than his to him.

He has found wherein to forget himself ... but I, too, find the same, though not so continuously.

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

_November 1879._

WE WILL STILL FIGHT ON

What an insignificant trifle may sometimes transform the whole man!

Full of melancholy thought, I walked one day along the highroad.

My heart was oppressed by a weight of gloomy apprehension; I was overwhelmed by dejection. I raised my head.... Before me, between two rows of tall poplars, the road darted like an arrow into the distance.