I am a ray. The fount of Light I cannot circumscribe. And yet I fly. Through the dark nights I fly, through stars and pallid moons; I kindle ephemeral scintillations, I send out my trembling light towards infinity's eternal flame, from which shines forth the sun of all the suns. And now I darken, totter, pale; I lose my breath, my hope, I smoulder like a spark.
And lo! again I energize my rays, cast into endless skies; again I illume myself and burn; I reach forth, I fly in space as a fiery ribbon from the spindle of the spirit. Now my tiny ray approaches the great sun; it is already burning with eternity's first blush. As an arrow I sling myself into the bright path, illuminated by the rosy dawn. I am a ray—the fount of Light I cannot circumscribe. Let me, then, be encompassed by its dome.
II.
I am a spark of eternity; and I am a pilgrim. Even to-day shall I pass away, after a while, after an hour's stroke, together with the smoke of the shepherd's fire, which writhes in blue strands over the forest in the eve, and disappears in the tears of dew before the night. Even to-day shall I be divorced from that power, which holds me here from the twilight to the twilight, and the sun shall not see me more with his golden eyes.
I am a spark of eternity. Beyond the cold ashes I shall exist even to the dawn, ... And then in my own embers shall I wax in brightness, glow as gold and burn as ruby; I shall pass through the grayness of the dust of this my bed, and before the rosy dawn shall have bathed herself in dew, before the sun shall have lifted his golden gaze from beyond the sea, I shall strike into the flames of life.
III.
How many dawns, how many twilights have I passed? Do I know it myself? Through how many gates of body and of soul have I entered into life, as an eternal voyager, who is born daily, now here, now there, from the sleep of death, in the earliest morn.
And then, exhausted, I departed to the West, through the great twilight dusk, which, all blazing with gold and red as blood, led me into the silent fields of blue, upon the dreamy meadows of the moon, all heaving with the beating of the wings of Psyche-butterflies, where I sought my sleep, and my head leaning on eternity's great bosom, I rested after a life and before a life.
IV.
Myself—the gate, and myself—the path, once only in this cycle have I issued from the Divine Light. Once only blew its breath for all bodies and souls, once only has it in the morning of Day opened its bosom of luminous archetypal thought,—and all subsequent myriads of forms, before and now, were sculptured by myself.