_Ton peuple vivra,_ _Mais ton empire penche, Allemagne!..._ And then I fell to thinking on love, I know not why, unless it was for the millions of lovers taken so suddenly from the world, or because of those yet left. How shall I say? But I knew that there were three things, not two—the lover, the beloved, and love. And of this last and separate thing one can have, in extremely sensitive states, impersonal cognizance, when for some reason (again what know I?) fancy has been set free, imagination stirred, and they go flinging themselves, not so much about the personal as about the common destiny. For a moment, so brief that it was gone even as it came, my soul caught the light that hangs over dear, persistent, far, illusory hills of fancy and inclination, and felt the mysterious break of feeling on the dim, shadowy lake of the heart. Vague, beaming forms passed along its shores, dissolving, lambent outlines, awakening desire for all the beauty of the wide earth, for things not in my personal destiny, and which, if they were to be, would be no better than that which is, not even so good. It was the greed of the human heart.... And I cried out from my many-times-turned pillow, “O Life, O Love, O Death, O too, too fragile illusion of existence!” _4 A.M._—A soft, rich-toned bell is striking. A cold breath comes in at the window, a cock crows. There is the first sound of the click of sabots across the square; the Day of Peace is about to break over the world. But here in the bed of the young deserter from the German ranks, dead in Champagne, the war still has me in its arms and presses me close to its cold, oozing breast. The familiar odor of drying blood comes to me. Old groans strike on my ear. Those who, dying, are not dead crowd about me, and the “blue-black cloud” envelops me. I am weary unto dissolution. And Sleep, darling Sleep—not even a brush of your wings against me! In this early morning, in the “little hour before dawn,” the grief of the world sits tight about my heart—the icy hurt for things dead and gone, and the heaviness of those who awaken to a world empty of what was once the heart’s concern and desire. Old distastes, too, press on me, old distastes, I say, not hates. How hate any one like unto myself, hurrying along the night-path to the grave, mutual, frightened possessors of a shadowy, urgent immortality? For these last few years I have entered, as it were, into some knowledge of charity, not that I like everybody, but I have come to realize that the distaste is often in myself and not due to some fault or lesser excellence in others. Truly in this whole journey I have encountered but two whom in an idle, hazy way I did not like; one was of an amorphic species and the other had judgments too violent, and at the same time too conventional and platitudinous, to permit interest. But even of these I shall ultimately think with indulgence.