Created, that in seeing Him alone
Have peace. And in a circle spreads so far
That the circumference were too loose a zone
To girdle in the sun!’”
He quoted the lines with strange eagerness and fervour,—and El-Râmi looked at him curiously.
“What odd dreams you have!” he said, not unkindly—“Always fantastic and impossible, but beautiful in their way. You should set them down in black and white, and see how earth’s critics will bespatter your heaven with the ink of their office pens! Poor boy!—how limply you would fall from ‘Paradise’!—with what damp dejected wings!”
Féraz smiled.
“I do not agree with you”—he said—“If you speak of imagination,—only in this case I am not imagining,—no one can shut out that Paradise from me at any time—neither pope nor king, nor critic. Thought is free, thank God!”
“Yes—perhaps it is the only thing we have to be really thankful for,”—returned El-Râmi—“Well—I will leave you to resume your ‘dreams’—only don’t sleep with the windows open. Summer evenings are treacherous,—I should advise you to get to bed.”
“And you?” asked Féraz, moved by a sudden anxiety which he could not explain.