In the evening, when everything is tired and quiet, I sit with Walt
Whitman by the rose beds and listen to what that lonely and beautiful
spirit has to tell me of night, sleep, death, and the stars. This dusky,
silent hour is his; and this is the time when I can best hear the
beatings of that most tender and generous heart. Such great love, such
rapture of jubilant love for nature, and the good green grass, and
trees, and clouds, and sunlight; such aching anguish of love for all
that breathes and is sick and sorry; such passionate longing to help and
mend and comfort that which never can be helped and mended and
comforted; such eager looking to death, delicate death, as the one
complete and final consolation--before this revelation of yearning,
universal pity, every-day selfishness stands awe-struck and ashamed.
When I drive in the forests, Keats goes with me; and if I extend my
drive to the Baltic shores, and spend the afternoon on the moss beneath
the pines whose pink stems form the framework of the sea, I take
Spenser; and presently the blue waves are the ripples of the Idle Lake,
and a tiny white sail in the distance is Phaedria's shallow ship,
bearing Cymochles swiftly away to her drowsy little nest of delights.
How can I tell why Keats has never been brought here, and why Spenser is
brought again and again? Who shall follow the dark intricacies of the
elementary female mind? It is safer not to attempt to do so, but by
simply cataloguing them collectively under the heading Instinct, have
done with them once and for all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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