The Wise One walked to and fro as before, and there was silence: and I
saw that with steady will he pierced the tumultuous gloom of the cave,
and a spirit awoke here and there from its dream. And I though I saw
that Sad Singer become filled with a new longing for true being, and
that the illusions of good and evil fell from him, and that he came at
last to the knees of the Wise One to learn the supreme truth. In
the misty midnight I hear these three voices--the Sad Singer, the
Enchantress Lilith, and the Wise One. From the Sad Singer I learned
that thought of itself leads nowhere, but blows the perfume from every
flower, and cuts the flower from every tree, and hews down every tree
from the valley, and in the end goes to and fro in waste places--gnawing
itself in a last hunger. I learned from Lilith that we weave our own
enchantment, and bind ourselves with out own imagination. To think of
the true as beyond us or to love the symbol of being is to darken the
path to wisdom, and to debar us from eternal beauty. From the Wise One
I learned that the truest wisdom is to wait, to work, and to will in
secret. Those who are voiceless today, tomorrow shall be eloquent, and
the earth shall hear them and her children salute them. Of these three
truths the hardest to learn is the silent will. Let us seek for the
highest truth.
1894
THE STORY OF A STAR
The emotions that haunted me in that little cathedral town would be most
difficult to describe. After the hurry, rattle, and fever of the city,
the rare weeks spent here were infinitely peaceful. They were full of
a quaint sense of childhood, with sometimes a deeper chord touched--the
giant and spiritual things childhood has dreams of. The little room I
slept in had opposite its window the great gray cathedral wall; it was
only in the evening that the sunlight crept round it and appeared in
the room strained through the faded green blind. It must have been this
silvery quietness of color which in some subtle way affected me with the
feeling of a continual Sabbath; and this was strengthened by the bells
chiming hour after hour. The pathos, penitence, and hope expressed by
the flying notes colored the intervals with faint and delicate memories.
They haunted my dreams, and I heard with unutterable longing the dreamy
chimes pealing from some dim and vast cathedral of the cosmic memory,
until the peace they tolled became almost a nightmare, and I longed for
utter oblivion or forgetfulness of their reverberations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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