No joy without companionship of tears,—
What is the artist’s fame?—the golden chords
Of rapt musician? or the poet’s themes?
All incomplete!—the nailed-down coffin boards
Are mocking sequels to the grandest dreams.”
“That is not your creed,”—said El-Râmi with a searching look.
Féraz sighed. “No—it is not my actual creed—but it is my frequent thought.”
“A thought unworthy of you,”—said his brother—“There is nothing left ‘incomplete’ in the whole Universe—and there is no sequel possible to Creation.”
“Perhaps not,—but again perhaps there may be a sequel beyond all imagination or comprehension. And surely you must admit that some things are left distressingly incomplete. Shelley’s ‘Fragments’ for instance, Keats’s ‘Hyperion’—Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony——”
“Incomplete here—yes—;” agreed El-Râmi—“But—finished elsewhere, as surely as day is day, and night is night. There is nothing lost,—no, not so much as the lightest flicker of a thought in a man’s brain,—nothing wasted or forgotten,—not even so much as an idle word. We forget—but the forces of Nature are non-oblivious. All is chronicled and registered—all is scientifically set down in plain figures that no mistake may be made in the final reckoning.”