It is neither cold, nor too warm. All nature has the warmth of my body. How the feeble cry of these crickets touches me! At this end of the season, in this testamentary moment, the union of the sky and the earth (less sacramental today than it is amorous) consummates the matrimonial solemnity. O cruel destiny! Is repose always apart from me? Is there no peace for the heart of man? A spirit born for one only joy can pardon no delay. Absolute possession some day will not dry my tears! No joy of mine will be sufficient to make reparation for the bitterness of this grief. And I will salute this earth; not only with a frivolous jet of intricate phrases, but with the sudden discovery in me of an immense discourse circling the foot of the mountain like that sea of wheat crossed by a triple river. Like that plain and its roads, I fill the space between the mountains. With both eyes lifted toward the eternal mountains, I salute the venerable body of the earth. Through the air I no longer see its mere semblance, but its very flank, the gigantic assemblage of its limbs. O borders of the slope all about me! It is through you that we receive the waters of the sky, and you are the recipients of the Offering! This damp morning, at the turn of the road between the tomb and the tree, I saw the somber and enormous hill barred at the foot by the flashing line of a river, which stood out like a stream of milk in the light of noon. Like a body sinking through water of its own weight, during these four motionless hours I have been advancing to the heart of the light, feeling a divine resistance. I am holding myself erect in perfectly white air. While I cast no shadow, I am celebrating the orgy of the maturity of day. No longer, under the sudden brilliance of a greedy sun, does the earth burst into violent flowering. Lustral moment! A continual breath blows to us from between the Orient and the North. The opulent harvest, the trees weighed down with their burdens, stir ceaselessly under the soft irresistible wind. The fruits of the great earth are stirred in the purifying splendor. The sky is no longer high above us; brought low, it submerges and damps us. I, a new Hylas (like one who watches fishes below him suspended in watery spaces) see through this milkiness, this silver wherein I am drowned, a dazzling white bird with a pink throat flash into sight and lose itself in a brilliance that my eye cannot sustain. The whole day does not exhaust my salutation. At the somber hour,--when the wedding procession, armed with flaming torches, conducts the bridal carriage through the forest of orange trees, with all my being I lift applause and acclamation toward the red Sign I see upraised above the wild circle of flaming mountains.