A Syrup of the Bees

Love was the wine, and Jealousy the lees, Bitter of brine, and syrup of the bees.
And I rove on the breeze with the world of bees like the shadow of a bee: For a dead moonflower which the worms devour is the tomb of the soul of me.
O the hum of the bees in the mango trees it murmurs taboo! taboo! Should a dead moonflower which the worms devour smell sweet as the mangoes do?
What! shall I deem my flower a dream when I do find, each morn, Wet honey sips left on my lips, and in my heart, a thorn?
The Young Barbarians, when Rome's ecclesiastical polity got hold of them, were persuaded by their anxious foster-mother to sell their Scandinavian birthright of imagination for an unintelligible, theopathic mess of mystic Græco-Syrian pottage. But the demons, though driven generally from the field, lurked about in holes and corners, watching their opportunity. They took refuge in bypaths, leaving the high road: they lay in ambush in a thicket, whence nothing ever could dislodge them: that of fairy tales and fables.
And this is the exact condition in the India of to-day. The irony of fate has thrown together, as though by some vast geological convulsion, the dwellers in two valleys, one of whom sees everything through, so to say, a red mist, and the other through a blue: they move about and mix in a way together, totally unable to see things in the same light: and all the while this melancholy cuckoo-cry of common humanity fills the air with its reiteration, and people persist in handling the situation with a wilful and almost criminal determination to ignore what stares them in the face, and by so doing, still further accentuate the very thing they will not see. If you take two men who are infinitely far from being brothers, and forcibly unite them, on the pretext that they are, you will produce by irritation an enmity between them that would never have existed, had they been let alone.
I stood, a little while since, on the very edge of a plateau, that fell down sheer four thousand feet or more, into the valley of Mysore. Far in the distance to the north, the dense dark green forest jungle stretched away like a carpet, intersected here and there by Moyar's silver streams, with here and there a velvet boss, where a rounded hill stood up out of the plain. That carpet, as it seemed from the height, so uniform and close in its texture, is made of great trees, under which wander wild elephants in herds. To right and left, the valley ran both ways out of sight, like a monster chasm with one side removed. And in the air below, above, around, light wreaths and ragged fragments of cloud and mist floated and streamed and drifted, casting the most beautifully deep blue shifting shadows not only on the earth, but on the air, like waterfalls of colour, half hiding and half framing the distant view, and cutting the sunlight into intermittent fountains of a golden semi-purple rain that fell and changed, now here, now there, now, as you looked upon them, gone, now suddenly shooting out elsewhere to transform every colour that they touched into something other than it was, like a magic show suddenly thrown out by the Creator in the silent and unfrequented solitude of his hills, for sheer delight and as it were simply for his own amusement, not caring in the least whether there might be any eye open to catch and worship such a beautiful profusion of his power, or not. For, strange! the spell and mysterious appeal of all such momentary glimpses lies, not in what you see, but in what you do not hear: it is the dead silence, the stillness, that by a paradox seems to be the undertone, or background, of moving mist and lonely mountain peaks.