There is nothing benign, nothing enlightening--no gentleness, no pity--in its barren beauty. But its hard chaste influence on the sensitive spirit is beyond any analytic power to gauge. Its wonderful Aridness starves human nerve-soil till the sad wide eyes of the Soul grow bright--fever-bright, light-bright, star-bright--from denial and unconscious prayer: involuntary worship: homage of the unsuppliant unhoping dévotee. Because of that--and because of all its long-familiar outsidenesses-- mournful, beautiful, mystic, lavish, madly-mixed, gray-purple--a fascination beyond plaisance or pain--I feel love for this Butte. _The subdivided cell_ To-morrow When I was twenty I was one strong Cell firmly, primly closing many little cells different from each other but each greenly intact. When I was thirty the Cell had burst in dusty worldly winds and loosed the little cells. Those in turn had subdivided, losing strength by the cellful but gaining in shadowed truth by a roundabout road. And they showed me my fates and inevitablenesses as in a broad wrecked field misty but plain to view. And thus I see me in the subdivided cells: a piece of a normal woman. a piece of a child. a piece of a poet. a piece of a Lesbian woman. a piece of a writer. a piece of a jester. a piece of a savage. a piece of something someway brave. a piece of a student. a patriotic American. a lump of tiredness. My strength is in knowing the evil from the good and the false from the true in it. My weakness is in wildly waveringly inclining toward the false. Except for love of my country I am ardenter, determinder, stronger in my falseness than in any of my shadowy truth. _Food and fire_ To-morrow The first beauty in my life is John Keats. In John Keats is my faith in some resurrection. Without John Keats human nature feels to be something broken, menacing, unspeakably despicable and lost--lost in the shade. With John Keats the lights break across it and reflect the blazing yellow sun again from eyes and foreheads and fingers and shining hair. There are world-and-human things which it thrills me to think about and dwell on: Nathan Hale on the British gallows: the charge of Pickett’s Confederate infantry at Gettysburg: Henry V, prince among kings and men, at Agincourt: Charlotte Corday in prison: Columbus with his felon crews sailing westward: Susan B. Anthony--a woman made in a strange still heroic splendor half-incredible: Alexander Hamilton: Arnold Winkelried: the sea-worn Pilgrim women disembarking into bitter Novemberness. Those thrill me because they are brave persons and brave things full of idealistic strife: but they still are made of very struggling-garbled world-stuff--they are mere human fabric--till I think of John Keats: and at once they grow informing and eternal. In his light the detailed world burns and glows!