Hear me, passionate stricken one! Hear me this once: then if you will forget me; if you can remember still.—For I have pondered on the rune of dreams and therein I have read: That Beauty is always in the search and in the seeker; it is a wandering and not a goal; a wave and not the sea; a flame and not the candle: It is that soul which is not man, nor woman, nor child, nor anything at all save one long shattered cry echoing down the galleries of stupendous night! It is this cry that I now send to you, valiant and wayward one, my sister:—— This, and once more, this: “Hail and farewell.” IV _The Lover’s Lament_ Once in the waning of an autumn day, as I was reading to my beloved from a little book of verse, I came upon the lines: “They are not long, the days of wine and roses: out of a misty dream....” But suddenly a flower-like hand covered the page from my eyes and the moment of sweet gladness that was mine vanished like the saffron tints from the clouds beyond, as I felt her arms steal about my body and saw her mute poppy lips craving yet another kiss—yet another kiss. V _Wanderers_ Dreaming one night of a triumphant journey along the Milky Way, traversing the Infinite from world to world as though on flaming cushions, I was awakened by a dull shuffling noise outside my door. I listened for a moment: “Ah, it is only the old blind woman across the hall, stumbling in the darkness on the way to her room.”—And I went to sleep again, but my dream had gone forever.... VI _The Accursed_ “Into the same river thou mayst not step twice!” Oh sage grim one, weaver at a sable loom, Heraclitus,—arise from your ashes and I will show you a woman so fair that looking on her you will love, and loving, nevermore plait your sombre nets of Change!—“Into the same river thou mayst not step twice!”—Not even if the river’s name is Love? Answer me, spirit of desperation, ruthless passer-by: not even Love?—Silence, only silence, and the continual hasting of waters down to the sea.... VII _Ennui_ I am tired of dancing and song, of pictures and the words that men ceaselessly utter without need. And of my own dancing and song, of my own visions and unavailing speech I am more tired still.—If so it might be, I would like to have a room at the top of a tower, far above the earth: a room consecrated to silence, where only the night could enter. And there I would sit forever by the window, receiving the benedictions of the stars, and watching in the moon’s pale disc the reflections in lovers’ eyes as they drank from one another at the sorrowful fountains of illusion. VIII _The Rose-Jar_