Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/121

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MY NATIVE HORIZON

purple foiliated by the bright pink gables, suggests to me the skyscrapers of New York at dusk or the electric legends of its White Way at night. And that renews my hope as well as my anxiety.

The weak races, I ask, why are they so strong in their land of adoption, so weak in their native land,—so bold and daring there, so docile here? And the moon disappears in the clouds, as if she did not care to listen. I look with half-shut eyes and in the seen I see the unseen. Behind the clouds I behold the moon smiling mystically; within the darkness I see the potential spark of the eternal fire; and behind the faint lights of the village I see the moving, darkness of the human soul. And so, I say to myself: Depend not always on the known senses; look at things with half-shut eyes. And often I do so. Even with the eye of the soul into things moral and social.

I look out of my northern window in the day on a prospect terrible, wild and majestic. The valley below, the deep

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