form or truth which it embodies, and the intellect which arrests that form and that truth. This intellect ought to be sterile, because it is an end and not a means. The lyre has performed its task when it has given forth the harmony, and the harmony, being divine, has no task to perform. In sounding and in floating into eternal silence, it has lent life and beauty to its parent world. Therefore I account you happy, renowned Avicenna, in spite of your humorous regrets; for what survives of you here is the very happiness of your life, realized in the intellect, as alone happiness can be realized; and if this happiness is imperfect, that is not because it is past, but because its elements were too impetuous to be reduced to harmony. This imperfect happiness of yours is all the more intelligible and comforting to me on account of its discords unresolved; they bring you nearer to my day and to its troubles. You have all we can hope for; and your frank lamentations, proving as they do the splendour of your existence, seem to me pure music in contrast to the optimism I must daily listen to in a wretched world.
NOCTURNE
If the deep wood is haunted, it is I
Who am the ghost; not the tall trees
Nor the white moonlight slanting down like rain
Filling the hollows with bright pools of silver.
A long train whistle serpentines around the hill
Now shrill, now far away.
Tell me, from what dark smoky terminal,
What train sets out for yesterday?
Or, since our spirits take off and resume
Their flesh as travellers their cloaks, O tell me where,
In what age and what country you will come
That I may meet you there.
