Its reality
those know who have felt it.
And we, on that moonlight night, put down our head on the window, "Oh, God!
we are happy, happy; thy child forever. Oh, thank you, God!" and we drop
asleep.
Next morning the Bible we kiss. We are God's forever. We go out to work,
and it goes happily all day, happily all night; but hardly so happily, not
happily at all, the next day; and the next night the devil asks us, "where
is your Holy Spirit?"
We cannot tell.
So month by month, summer and winter, the old life goes on--reading,
praying, weeping, praying. They tell us we become utterly stupid. We know
it. Even the multiplication table we learnt with so much care we forgot.
The physical world recedes further and further from us. Truly we love not
the world, neither the things that are in it. Across the bounds of sleep
our grief follows us. When we wake in the night we are sitting up in bed
weeping bitterly, or find ourself outside in the moonlight, dressed, and
walking up and down, and wringing our hands, and we cannot tell how we came
there. So pass two years, as men reckon them.
V.
Then a new time.
Before us there were three courses possible--to go mad, to die, to sleep.
We take the latter course; or nature takes it for us.
All things take rest in sleep; the beasts, birds, the very flowers close
their eyes, and the streams are still in winter; all things take rest; then
why not the human reason also? So the questioning devil in us drops
asleep, and in that sleep a beautiful dream rises for us.
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