SHE IS STILL a child, my lord. She runs about your palace and plays, and tries to make of you a plaything as well. She heeds not when her hair tumbles down and her careless garment drags in the dust. She falls asleep when you speak to her and answers not-and the flower you give her in the morning slips to the dust from her hands. When the storm bursts and darkness is over the sky she is sleepless; her dolls lie scattered on the earth and she clings to you in terror. She is afraid that she may fail in service to you. But with a smile you watch her at her game. You know her. The child sitting in the dust is your destined bride; her play will be stilled and deepened into love.
BEHIND AN infinite secrecy of the dark from which the world of prying lights was shut out there walked in the Destroyer, and underneath the pall of an ominous hush rehearsed reparation in the deep of my being. At last the stage was made vacant for the new act of life's play, when a fiery finger from the sky touched a fringe of the darkness and a lightning thrill pierced the immensity of sleep breaking it to pieces. A stream of awakening began to course through the veins of a blind inertness as the first flood of the rainy June pursues its branching path amidst the emptiness of a dry river-bed. Big boulders of shadows barricaded the passage of light and created confusion till they were swept away, and the spirit of new life unbared herself in a luminous horizon of peace. This body of mine the carrier of the burden of a past seemed to me like an exhausted cloud slipping off from the listless arm of the morning. I felt freed from its clasp in the heart of an incorporeal light at the furthest shore of evanescent things.
