Melville Davisson Post

“ Nature was greater than the Buddhist ritual. What amulet had his monastic order to stand against the deviltry of this laugh?
The activities of the mind cannot be measured by the ticking of a clock. These reflections, these vivid alluring pictures, these troubled memories, passed before him in a brief, a limited portion of time.
The Oriental in him vividly realized the imagery of the greatest love-song in any language known to us. ”

“ Passion carried into a solitude is elevated to a tyranny. Nature, the great enchantress, presents her drugged cup, and after it is drunken leaves the victim in the sacred groves to his fancy.
And on this day her drugged cup had been swallowed brimming. The man’s fancy awfully assailed him. They appeared, these two exquisite women, in alluring visions. And so potent is the ancient drugged cup that in the man’s fancy they had the aspect and the realities of life. ”

“ It was night. The world as by some trick of sorcery was in a blue hazy darkness. The man hurried, stumbling down the long wooded hill to the river, to the tiny boat in which he had crossed this morning when he had followed the faint path along the river to the highway skirting the town. Now returning through the hills, he descended to cross the river.
He was a long time, in the blue haze of the night, on his way down; he was haunted, followed; and confused, he kept losing the way.
The moon rose. He found the boat, released it and pulled out into the river. ”

“ His eager glance passed before these two persons, lingered—remained: a man at middle life and a girl.
Here in its golden lure was the mystery he renounced. And the spirit of the man, standing apart from the deep, even, level voice that filled the remote spaces of the church, profoundly regarded her. ”

“ Peace, an immense security, was the promise of this service to the soul of man confused by emotions. And it appalled the soul that it would soothe and comfort. Its serene pronouncement, on every ecstasy of the senses, put the soul in fear. ”

“ There followed hordes of women, in every spectacular costume that a crude fancy, endeavoring to reproduce the visit of the Queen of Sheba, could imagine.
Then the fans, immense, downy and soft, moving as in rhythm above the Oriental beauty, for a moment revealed her.
And the man on the curb,—this Buddhist novitiate in the clerical dress of the Church of England, this youth,—straining forward on his toes, sprang into the street, crossed in a stride and leaped onto the float. ”

“ To produce this exquisite creature, the creative energies of Nature had been at work from the beginning, for so long a time that the human under standing staggered at the thought of it, and with an endless patience. ”

“ AND before the man—flung back, bruised, numb, as by the battering of a wave—there appeared in fancy a vast, immobile image of Buddha, over beyond this pageant: serene in an eternal calm, as though abominably indifferent to the soul of man, bewildered by emotions and drugging itself with dreams. ”

“ And Nature, the great enchantress, the divine guardian of life, had her mighty will with him. From the tension that had peopled the night with Nereides he felt that he had escaped. But he had, in fact, escaped from nothing. It was, only, that the Enchantress turned him a little in her drugged hands. ”

“ The lotus-eater, his hands under his relaxed head, his limbs extended, and pressing the earth beneath him like a dead weight, gives to the eye this impression of serenity, of a lifeless indolence, that his heated fancy, burning within him, awfully negatives. ”

“ And as the voice advanced pronouncing the great love-song, human and sensuous, here, in the sacred books of this religion, the spirit of the man idled, curious, before the actual physical mystery that inspired these vivid extravagancies. ”

“ There were men in the world, then, ruthless and determined, whose resistance he had not considered. This granite fact, with which the bubbles of his fancy must inevitably collide, he had wholly failed to realize. One passed him with the thing he wished, and he could not meet, even, the cold sweep of his eye! ”

“ It resisted on this morning—not in vigor, but in a vague reflection. The man who listened to the service—the man in the first maturity of youth—was concerned with the experience of life about to be denied him. ”