What hours, what memories! The
traces which remain to us of them are enough to fill us with respect and
enthusiasm, as though they had been visits of the Holy Spirit. And then,
to fall back again from these heights with their boundless horizons into
the muddy ruts of triviality! what a fall! Poor Moses! Thou too sawest
undulating in the distance the ravishing hills of the promised land, and
it was thy fate nevertheless to lay thy weary bones in a grave dug in
the desert! Which of us has not his promised land, his day of ecstasy
and his death in exile? What a pale counterfeit is real life of the life
we see in glimpses, and how these flaming lightnings of our prophetic
youth make the twilight of our dull monotonous manhood more dark and
dreary!
April 29 (Lancy).--This morning the air was calm, the sky slightly
veiled. I went out into the garden to see what progress the spring was
making. I strolled from the irises to the lilacs, round the flower-beds,
and in the shrubberies. Delightful surprise! at the corner of the walk,
half hidden under a thick clump of shrubs, a small leaved _chorchorus_
had flowered during the night. Gay and fresh as a bunch of bridal
flowers, the little shrub glittered before me in all the attraction of
its opening beauty. What springlike innocence, what soft and modest
loveliness, there was in these white corollas, opening gently to the
sun, like thoughts which smile upon us at waking, and perched upon their
young leaves of virginal green like bees upon the wing! Mother of
marvels, mysterious and tender nature, why do we not live more in thee?
The poetical _flaneurs_ of Toepffer, his Charles and Jules, the friends
and passionate lovers of thy secret graces, the dazzled and ravished
beholders of thy beauties, rose up in my memory, at once a reproach and
a lesson.
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