Sharper than pain, we love, and the caress, Keener than torment, overmaddens us! There is no fasting when our feverish lips Meet in the shock that strikes the spirit dumb With swooning raptures! The dilated soul, Intemperate with the enormous moan Of passion, would outleap the strenuous will. The flesh, transfigured with the crisis, reels, Stretches the chain of duty and would leap To grasp the tempting and forbidden fruit, Were not that virtue is our comrade now. We lift our eager faces to the sun And feast on life and in each other's souls Luxuriate, confounded with delight. For us no mouldy cloister waits its prey, Nor cave of darkness, where existence mourns And dies beneath its scourgings. We have made Our grim novitiate with reality. Have known its agony, for we were born So eminent for rapture, that the pain All men inherit desolated us And spread a living terror in our souls; So that through clouds of everlasting woe Scarce came the gleam of gladness or of love, And earth was pitiless, and brutal souls Who cannot feel there ruled. Oh, the wide world, Degraded by ignoble brutishness, Could yield no tendernesses infinite For we who feed on rapture. Thus it was Our souls on meeting, in the thrilling kiss Were fused in indissoluble embrace; We who were famished, in ideal love Found sustenance and passed from death to life! The song was perfect. The strange, fresh accents of the singers, so full of love and passion, melted every heart in the temple with their ecstasy. One might hear such measures without thought of lapse of time or of worldly concerns. Ah! if one could hear such melody forevermore! With a burst of dramatic joy the singing of the last stanza revealed whole worlds of rapture. Reincarnated in an earthly heaven, Now have we reached Nirvana, now Above us open the wide gulfs of joy, And luminous and glorious round us blow Millions of flowers; while afar there shines The mighty splendor of the exhaustless sea! We dwell in breathless joys, thrilled through and through With majesty and sweetness; we have grown Athletes of joy in our Agapemone: Eager and breathless, we have found at last The fount of youth, the magical Arjeels; Fruits of organic gold amid the leaves Sparkle, and around our island home Are spread the veritable golden sands Whereon our happy feet tread evermore!