Seated gigantically on the side of the night (Tr. 6) * * * * * --O these crowds, these crowds, and the misery and distress that whips them like billows. Monstrances, decorated with silk, towards the heaped up towns, in roofs of glass and crystal, from the height of the sacerdotal choir, stretch the cross of gothic ideas. They obtrude themselves in the gold of clear Sundays--All Saints' day, Christmas, Easter, and white Pentecosts. They obtrude themselves in the gold and in the incense and in the fête of the great organ beating with the flight of its storms. The red capitals and vermillion vaults are a soul, in sunlight, living in the old background and antique authoritarian mystery. Yet, when the song and the naive, prismatic anthem ceases, a grief of incense evaporated stamps itself on the golden tripods and brazen altars. And the stained glass windows, lofty with ages kneeling before Christ, with their immobile popes and martyrs and heroes, seem to tremble at the sound of a proud train passing through the town. (Tr. 7) Formerly--there was the errant, somnambulous life, across the mornings and fabulous evening, when the right hand of God towards the blue Canaans traced the golden road in the depth of the shadows. Formerly--there was the enormous, exasperated life, fiercely hung on the manes of stallions, suddenly, with great sparks from their hoofs, and towards immense space immensely provoked. Formerly--there was the ardent, evocative life; the white Cross of heaven, the red Cross of hell advanced, to the splendor of iron armors, each across blood, towards his victorious heaven. Formerly--there was the foaming livid life, alive and dead, with strokes of crime and tocsins, battle between them, of proscribers and assassins, with splendid and mad death above them. (Tr. 8) The melancholy time has ornamented its hours like dead flowers; the passing year has yellowed its days like dry leaves. The pale dawn is seen by gloomy waters and the faces of evening have bled under the arrows of the laughing, bleeding, mysterious wind. (Tr. 9) I know sad waters in which die the evenings; flowers which nobody gathers fall there one by one. (Tr. 10) Yesterday the dawn was so pale over the peaceful meadows and shavegrass; in the clear morning came a child to gather plants, leaning on them his pure hands that gathered the asphodels. Noon was heavy with storm and dismal with sunlight in the garden dead of pride in its lethargic sleep of flowers and trees; the water was hard to the eye like marble, the marble warm and clear like water, and the child that came was comely, clad in purple and golden-hair, and long one saw the peonies, one by one, draw their blood from the petals at the passage of the fair child. The child that came that evening was naked. He gathered roses in the dusk, he sobbed at having come, he retreated before his shadow. It is like him, naked, that my destiny has recognized itself. (Tr. 11)