They accept this life, which is Intoxicating life, but never feel its texture with their fingers. They gather a Blue iris by a marsh-edge and let it die in their sweating hands, or let it fall to the ground as they walk, or throw it away when the Blue petals droop: without looking at it and breathing it and knowing it: without sensing the tremulous Blue to be lovelier in its wilting. Theirs is the thick fat solidly-fierce egotism of an emperor or an infant whose main metaphysic concept is that _he_ is alive, and will remain alive, and must be alive, though all around him bleed drop by drop to their death. I have analyzed mine, and it is not so with me. If I say I am enchanting or false or despicable it is because I know it’s true. Not because I say it but because I have tested and proved it. I feel the textures of my life with the tips of my fingers. I turn my senses outward and let the old winds blow over them--icy, balmy, harsh, gentle, scorching, cooling. I suffer for it but I know those winds: songs of seas and stars and of little pebbles are in their thunderous-dim wailing: life is in the soft stinging perfume of their wings. No breath of poetry and beauty comes to me that I do not pay for with the beating ache of my Heart, the nervous tensions of my Body, the fraying and shredding of my Soul. If any beauty or poet-thing comes easily and gives me pleasure and not pain, I know I have not yet got it and that it will come again. It will come again: with the pain. I can’t eat cake and have it. I can’t make silk purses out of sows’ ears. Those things I learn nearly perfectly from playing on my harp with the Worn Strings. _A strongly-windy Saturday_ To-morrow It is a strongly-windy Saturday. A thought achieves itself in my roiled-and-placid brain: that one half of me is Mad, but the other half is doubly Sane and someway over-Sane, so that in it all I break a little better than even. _A someway separate individual_ To-morrow This Body I live in is familiar and mysterious. It is like a book of poetry to read and read again. It has the owned sentientness of bone-and-flesh, and with it tremors fine as spirit-emotions. My Body is more chaste than my Mind, my Heart and my Soul. My Body if fragile is healthful, and is one with the woman-race: it moves with the sunlit cosmos. My Mind wanders in sex-chaos and muses on piquant impure things, enchanting villainies, odd inversions, whatnot. My Soul--a sweet and an exquisite Thing--its tired wings have borne it languidly down the dim stairways of many centuries, some leading in wilful perverted ways. And my Heart is a pagan Heart. Its essence is flavored with the day and lyric trail of the Sapphic students.