Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/309

 remembrance.

The thought of his brave radiant loveliness reassures me to myself, by the hour.

I am futile: but he is mysteriously omnipotently useful and I catch some of it from him.

I am half-full of vanity: but he is of a lustrous priceless vanity himself that justifies mine and all the world's.

I am fearing and false: but he is so brave, so true to infinite form, that by it he leavens the lump of the whole world's mendacious cowardice.

My brain is full of wilding darknesses, snarled and knotted gifts and penchants: but into his strong brain the strong fresh yellow rain-washed sun shines straight down—through the wide twin-brightness of his Eyes. I look down his Eyes—twin public wells (he belongs publicly and privately to all this mixed mad world, and anyone may look!—)—I look into that titanic vibrant brain, and mine catches some of it: a blest and precious Disease, oh, a rare Disease!

My Heart—my Heart feels strange and tired and dead, a bit of dead-sea fruit: but his heart, warm and real and boundlessly unsatisfied, is always the deep quick fragrant Rose of this World.

A Hero!—a Poet-at-arms!—John Keats!

'He has outsoared the shadow of our night,' wrote