With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for
conquer’d and slain persons.
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit
in which they are won.
I beat and [...]
There ’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’t is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is ’t [...]
I came to love you too late, Oh Beauty, so ancient and so new. Yes, I came to love you too late. What did I know? You wereinside me, and I was out of my body and mind, looking for you. Idrove like an ugly madman against the beautiful things andbeings you made. You were [...]
Where is my dwelling place? Where I can never stand.
Where is my final goal, toward which I should ascend?
It is beyound all place. What should my quest then be?
I must, transcending God, into the desert flee.
Angelus Silesius
You who celebrate bygones!
Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races—the life that has exhibited itself;
Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers and priests;
I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in himself, in his own rights,
Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom [...]
My terminus near,
The clouds already closing in upon me,
The voyage balk’d—the course disputed, lost,
I yield my ships to Thee.
Steersman unseen! henceforth the helms are Thine;
Take Thou command—(what to my petty skill Thy navigation?)
My hands, my limbs grow nerveless;
My brain feels rack’d, bewilder’d; Let the old timbers part—I will not part!
I will cling fast to Thee, [...]
It sheds a shy solemnity,
This lamp in our poor room.
O grey and gold amenity, –
Silence and gentle gloom!
Wide from the world, a stolen hour
We claim, and none may know
How love blooms like a tardy flower
Here in the day’s after-glow.
And even should the world break in
With jealous threat and guile,
The world, at last, must bow and [...]
But enough poetry! I shed tears; well, then, let me cry. Maybe everyone will laugh at this foolishness, but you won’t. Your eyes are shining, too. Enough poetry. I want to tell you now about the ‘insects,’ about those to whom God gave sensuality:
To insects—sensuality!
I am that very insect, brother, and those words are precisely [...]
