No More Learning

Yes, it is in this atmosphere that it would be good to live,--yonder,
where slower hours contain more thoughts, where the clocks strike the
hours of happiness with a more profound and significant solemnity.

Upon the shining panels, or upon skins gilded with a sombre opulence,
beatified paintings have a discreet life, as calm and profound as the
souls of the artists who created them.

The setting suns that colour the rooms and salons with so rich a light,
shine through veils of rich tapestry, or through high leaden-worked
windows of many compartments. The furniture is massive, curious, and
bizarre, armed with locks and secrets, like profound and refined souls.
The mirrors, the metals, the ail ver work and the china, play a mute and
mysterious symphony for the eyes; and from all things, from the corners,
from the chinks in the drawers, from the folds of drapery, a singular
perfume escapes, a Sumatran _revenez-y_, which is like the soul of the
apartment.

A true country of Cockaigne, I have said; where all is rich, correct and
shining, like a beautiful conscience, or a splendid set of silver, or a
medley of jewels. The treasures of the world flow there, as in the house
of a laborious man who has well merited the entire world. A singular
land, as superior to others as Art is superior to Nature; where Nature
is made over again by dream; where she is corrected, embellished,
refashioned.

Let them seek and seek again, let them extend the limits of their
happiness for ever, these alchemists who work with flowers! Let them
offer a prize of sixty or a hundred thousand florins to whosoever can
solve their ambitious problems! As for me, I have found my _black tulip_
and my _blue dahlia_!

Incomparable flower, tulip found at last, symboli-cal dahlia, it is
there, is it not, in this so calm and dreamy land that you live and
blossom? Will you not there be framed in your proper analogy, and will
you not be mirrored, to speak like the mystics, in your own
_correspondence_?

Dreams! --always dreams!
and the more ambitious and delicate the soul,
the farther from possibility is the dream. Every man carries within him
his dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed, and, from
birth to death, how many hours can we count that have been filled with
positive joy, with successful and decided action? Shall we ever live in
and become a part of the picture my spirit has painted, the picture that
resembles you?

These treasures, furnishings, luxury, order, perfumes and miraculous
flowers, are you. You again are the great rivers and calm canals. The
enormous ships drifting beneath their loads of riches, and musical with
the sailors' monotonous song, are my thoughts that sleep and stir upon
your breast. You take them gently to the sea that is Infinity,
reflecting the profundities of the sky in the limpid waters of your
lovely soul;--and when, outworn by the surge and gorged with the
products of the Orient, the ships come back to the ports of home, they
are still my thoughts, grown rich, that have returned to you from
Infinity.




WHAT IS TRUTH?


I once knew a certain Benedicta whose presence ailed the air with the
ideal and whose eyes spread abroad the desire of grandeur, of beauty, of
glory, and of all that makes man believe in immortality.

But this miraculous maiden was too beautiful for long life, so she died
soon after I knew her first, and it was I myself who entombed her, upon
a day when spring swung her censer even in the burial-ground. It was I
myself who entombed her, fast closed in a coffin of perfumed wood, as
uncorruptible as the coffers of India.

And, as my eyes rested upon the spot where my treasure lay hidden, I
became suddenly aware of a little being who singularly resembled the
dead; and who, stamping the newly-turned earth with a curious and
hysterical violence, burst into laughter, and said: "It is I, the true
Benedicta! It is I, the notorious drab! As the punishment of your folly
and blindness you shall love me as I truly am. "

But I, furious, replied: "No! " The better to emphasise my refusal I
struck the ground so violently with my foot that my leg was thrust up to
the knee in the recent grave, and I, like a wolf in a trap, was caught
perhaps for ever in the Grave of the Ideal.