Part 14 (2/2)

SHELIDAH,

_12th December 1895._

The other evening I was reading an English book of criticisms, full of all manner of disputations about Poetry, Art, Beauty, and so forth and so on.

As I plodded through these artificial discussions, my tired faculties seemed to have wandered into a region of empty mirage, filled with the presence of a mocking demon.

The night was far advanced. I closed the book with a bang and flung it on the table. Then I blew out the lamp with the idea of turning into bed. No sooner had I done so than, through the open windows, the moonlight burst into the room, with a shock of surprise.

That little bit of a lamp had been sneering drily at me, like some Mephistopheles: and that tiniest sneer had screened off this infinite light of joy issuing forth from the deep love which is in all the world.

What, forsooth, had I been looking for in the empty wordiness of the book?

There was the very thing itself, filling the skies, silently waiting for me outside, all these hours!

If I had gone off to bed leaving the shutters closed, and thus missed this vision, it would have stayed there all the same without any protest against the mocking lamp inside. Even if I had remained blind to it all my life,--letting the lamp triumph to the end,--till for the last time I went darkling to bed,--even then the moon would have still been there, sweetly smiling, unperturbed and un.o.btrusive, waiting for me as she has throughout the ages.

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