Nor does the monotony of this constant sound suffice to explain it.
It is a weary mourning whose cause is within itself. It is the self-absorption of love; it is the effort in labor. The heavens weep over the fruitful earth. Not only Autumn, and the future fall of fruit whose seed she nourishes, draws these tears from the wintry cloud. Sorrow is in the Summer; in the flower of life is the blossoming of death.
At the moment when the hour before noon is ended, as I descend into the valley filled with the murmur of various fountains, I pause enchanted by the gloom. How abundant are these waters! And if tears, like blood, have their perpetual source in us, how refreshing it is, listening to this liquid choir of voices, deep or shrill, to harmonize from them all the shades of grief! There is no passion but could borrow of your tears, oh fountain! And since the brightness of this single drop, falling from on high into the basin upon the image of the moon, satisfies my particular desire, not in vain shall I have learned to love your sanctuary through many dreamy afternoons, oh sorrowful valley!
I return to the plain. On the doorsill of his hut,—where, in the inner darkness, gleams a candle lit for some rustic fête,-a man sits, holding in his hand a dusty cymbal. It rains heavily. In the midst of this damp solitude, I hear only the cry of a goose.
THE NIGHT VOYAGE
I have forgotten why I undertook this voyage, and what matter I was to negotiate, as Confucius did when he went to carry his doctrine to the Prince of Ou. Seated all day in the depths of my varnished cabin, my urgency, on these calm waters, does not outrun the swanlike progress of the little boat. Only occasionally in the evening I come out to look at the aspect of the country.
Our winter here has no severity. Season dear to the philosopher, these bare trees, this yellow grass, sufficiently attest the passing of the time, without atrocious cold or unnecessary violence. In this twelfth month, cemeteries and kitchen gardens, and a country mounded everywhere with tombs, spread out in dull productivity. The clumps of blue bamboo, the somber pines above the sepulchers, the gray-green reed-grass, arrest and satisfy one’s gaze. The yellow flowers of the New Year’s Candlestick and the waxen berries of the Soot Tree give a real beauty to the somber picture. I proceed in peace across this temperate region.
Now it is night. It would be vain to wait, stationed in the bow of this junk, for the reflection of our wooden anchor to trace on the beatified water the image of that waning moon which only midnight holds for us. All is dark; but as we move on, propelled by the scull which steers our prow, we need not fear mistaking our way. These canals permit of numberless detours. Let us pursue the voyage with tranquillity, our eyes on yonder solitary star.
THE HALT ON THE CANAL
Now,—passing the place where old men and women congregate, driven from their far-off villages by the need of food, and traveling on rafts made of their house-doors, guided by the domestic duck,—encountering waters which seem as if they were flooded with rice, that they may fitly enter into a region of opulence; pushing across this large and rectilinear canal which bounds the rude high wall enclosing the city and its people, where the exaggerated arch of a bridge frames with evening the crenelated tower of a gate opening on the dark countryside; by the wharf we tie up our boat among square stone tombs in the grass, the crude material of epitaphs.