“And many a day's hours were like that. As if someone fashioned my likeness somewherein order to torment it slowly with needles.I felt each sharp prick of his playing,and it was: as if a rain fell on mein which all things change.”

“FALLING STARS: Do you remember still the falling starsthat like swift horses through the heavens racedand suddenly leaped across the hurdlesof our wishes -- do you recall? And wedid make so many! For there were countless numbersof stars: each time we looked above we wereastounded by the swiftness of their daring play,while in our hearts we felt safe and securewatching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,knowing somehow we had survived their fall.”

“I love the dark hours of my being.My mind deepens into them.There I can find, as in old letters,the days of my life, already lived,and held like a legend, and understood.”

“How they are all about, these gentlemenIn chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced,Like night around their order's star and gemAnd growing ever darker, stony-faced,And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but proppedHigh by their bodice, one hand loosely dropped,Small like its collar, on the toy King-Charles:How they surround each one of these who stoppedTo read and contemplate the objects d'art,Of which some pieces still are theirs, not ours.Whit exquisite decorum they allow usA life of whose dimensions we seem sureAnd which they cannot grasp. They were aliveTo bloom, that is be fair; we, to mature,That is to be of darkness and to strive.”

“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,in which you see me hurrying.Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;I am only one of my many mouths,and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.I am the rest between two notes,which are somehow always in discordbecause Death’s note wants to climb over—but in the dark interval, reconciled,they stay there trembling.And the song goes on, beautiful.”

“Oh hours of childhood,when behind each shape more than the past appearedand what streamed out before us was not the future.We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sakeof those with nothing left but their grownupness.”

“If the confident animal coming toward ushad a mind like ours,the change in him would startle us.But to him his own being is endless,undefined, and without regardfor his condition: clear,like his eyes. Where we see future,he sees all, and himselfin all, made whole for always.”