And then think of the simpler, deeper notes of the symphony, the elements of light and warmth and color in our world, the very seeds of existence. I count that day the richest when we floated into the Cape harbor in the little rowboat, bathed in the afternoon sun. The fishermen were lazily winging in, knowing, like birds, the storm that would soon be on them. We drank the sun in all our pores. It rained down on you, and glorified your face and the flesh of your arms and your hands. We landed, and walked across the evening fields to that little hut. Then nature lived and glowed with the fervor of actual experience. You and the air and the sun-washed ocean, all were some great throbs of actualities.
She. You remember how I liked to ride with you and sail, the stormy days. How I loved to feel your body battling even feebly with the wind and rain. I loved to see your face grow crimson under the lash of the waves, and then to feel you, alive and mine!
He. It would not be bad, a heaven like that, of perpetual physical presentiment, of storms and sun, and rich fields, and long waves rolling up the beaches. For nerves ever alive and strung healthily all along the gamut of sensation! Days with terrific gloom, like the German forests of the Middle Ages; days with small nights spent on the sea; September days with a concealed meaning in the air. One would ride and battle and sail and eat. Then long kisses of love in bodies that spoke.
She. And yet, how strange to life as it is is that picture—like some mediæval song with the real people left out; strange to the dirty streets, the breakfasts in sordid rooms, the ignoble faces, the houses with failure written across the door-posts; strange to the life of papa and mamma; to the comfortable home; the chatter of the day; the horses; the summer trips—everything we have lived, you and I.
He. Incomplete, and hence merely a literary paradise. It is well, too, as it is, for until we can go to bed with the commonplace, and dine with sorrow, we are but children,—brilliant children, but with the unpleasant mark of the child. Not sorrow accepted, my love, and bemoaned; but sorrow fought and dislodged. He is great who feels the pain and sorrow and absorbs it and survives—he who can remain calm in it and believe in it. It is a fight; only the strong hold their own. That fight we call duty.
And duty makes the only conceivable world given the human spirit and the human frame: even should we believe that the world is a revolving palæstrinum without betterment. And the next world—the next? It must be like ours, too, in its action; it must call upon the same activities, the same range of desires and loves and hates. Grander, perhaps, more adorned, with greater freedom, with more swing, with a less troubled song as it rushes on its course. But a world like unto ours, with effort, with the keen jangle of persons in effort, with sorrow, aye, and despair: for there must be forfeits!
Is that not better than to slink away to death with the forlorn comfort of a
"Requiescat in pace?"
PARIS, December, 1895.