Page:Fantastics and other Fancies.djvu/161

 SPRING PHANTOMS

, descending her staircase of clouds in one of the "Petits Pofemes en Prose," enters the chamber of a newborn child, and whispers into his dreams: "Thou shalt love all that loves me,—the water that is formless and multiform, the vast green sea, the place where thou shalt never be, the woman thou shalt never know."

For those of us thus blessed or cursed at our birth, this is perhaps the special season of such dreams—of nostalgia, vague as the world-sickness, for the places where we shall never be; and fancies as delicate as arabesques of smoke concerning the woman we shall never know. There is a languor in the air; the winds sleep; the flowers exhale their souls in incense; near sounds seem distant, as if the sense of time and space were affected by hashish; the sunsets paint in the west pictures of phantom-gold, as of those islands at the mere aspect of whose beauty crews mutinied and burned their ships;