Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/306

 perfect sudden obvious blood-warm golden Now!

It is always old, old-fashioned ailment, worn of ages. The drowsy ache of the Nightingale goes a thousand years back and a thousand years to come: the restless ecstasy of a thousand thousand Nightingales, one for each who reads, in any age, all ages. Long, long after the jeweled English language is gone, dead as Homer's, Keats's Nightingale will flutter lyric-winged in the nervous jeweled lovely Now.

'Weep for Adonis,' wailed the differently-lovely Shelley, 'he is dead.' But he isn't dead. He is terribly living, passionately living.

Each day of my life I feel him living. He breathes. He breathes close to me, pantingly, like a swimmer breasting waves or a playing child in a summer day.—John Keats!

Just Beneath My Skin he is my God-of-the-World, my Fetich and my Lover. He has been my Lover for seven gold years.

He is the first beauty in my flawed futile life. He is the most beautiful thing in the living and dying world. John Keats—John Keats!—

In everyone else I can feel mixed motives, tough tangled silk threads of self woven into wonderful wefts of days and deeds: in everybody, from Iscariot to Toussaint L'Ouverture, from Jeanne d'Arc to