I long to catch the wild
bird, happiness, and tame it. Above all, I long to share it with others.
These delicious mornings impress me indescribably. They intoxicate me,
they carry me away. I feel beguiled out of myself, dissolved in
sunbeams, breezes, perfumes, and sudden impulses of joy. And yet all the
time I pine for I know not what intangible Eden.
Lamartine in the "Preludes" has admirably described this oppressive
effect of happiness on fragile human nature. I suspect that the reason
for it is that the finite creature feels itself invaded by the infinite,
and the invasion produces dizziness, a kind of vertigo, a longing to
fling one's self into the great gulf of being. To feel life too
intensely is to yearn for death; and for man, to die means to become
like unto the gods--to be initiated into the great mystery. Pathetic and
beautiful illusion.
_Ten o'clock in the evening_.--From one end to the other the day has
been perfect, and my walk this afternoon to Beau Vallon was one long
delight. It was like an expedition into Arcadia. Here was a wild and
woodland corner, which would have made a fit setting for a dance of
nymphs, and there an ilex overshadowing a rock, which reminded me of an
ode of Horace or a drawing of Tibur. I felt a kind of certainty that the
landscape had much that was Greek in it.
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