"Pray," they said, "and love! Adore a fatherly and
beneficent God." They recalled to me the accent of Haydn; there was in
them and in the landscape a childlike joyousness, a naive gratitude, a
radiant heavenly joy innocent of pain and sin, like the sacred,
simple-hearted ravishment of Eve on the first day of her awakening in
the new world. How good a thing is feeling, admiration! It is the bread
of angels, the eternal food of cherubim and seraphim.
I have not yet felt the air so pure, so life-giving, so ethereal, during
the five days that I have been here. To breathe is a beatitude. One
understands the delights of a bird's existence--that emancipation from
all encumbering weight--that luminous and empyrean life, floating in
blue space, and passing from one horizon to another with a stroke of the
wing. One must have a great deal of air below one before one can be
conscious of such inner freedom as this, such lightness of the whole
being. Every element has its poetry, but the poetry of air is liberty.
Enough; to your work, dreamer!
May 30, 1865.--All snakes fascinate their prey, and pure wickedness
seems to inherit the power of fascination granted to the serpent. It
stupefies and bewilders the simple heart, which sees it without
understanding it, which touches it without being able to believe in it,
and which sinks engulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles in Etna.
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