I have great trouble in behavior. I know what to do, I know what I at heart desire to do; but the doing of it, that is work, that labor is. I construct in my lonesome meditations the fairest scheme of my relations to my fellow-men, and to fellow-events; but when I go to set the words of solitary thought to the music of much-crowded action, I find ten thousand difficulties never suspected: difficulties of race, temperament, mood, tradition, custom, passion, unreason and other difficulties which I do not understand, as, for instance, the failure of contemporary men to recognize genius and great art.
I made me a song of serenade,
And I stole in the Night, in the Night,
To the window of the world where man slept light,
And I sang:
O my Love, my Love, my Fellow Man,
My Love.
I fled in tears from the men's ungodly quarrel about God: I fled in tears to the woods, and laid me down on the earth; then somewhat like the beating of many hearts came up to me out of the ground, and I looked and my cheek lay close by a violet; then my heart took courage and I said:
"I know that thou art the word of my God, dear Violet:
And Oh the ladder is not long that to my heaven leads.