Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/120

 me, if you have. And it is well at times that ambiguity, like a summer cloud, should temper the noon-day heat of our thought. For what difference is there—the thought was eating into me, while I trifled with the image—what difference is there between the life that deifies a silk rag or a piece of copper and the life that soils its lips and forehead in the dust before them. Here are the people and their decorated nobilities.... The Lethean breezes, blowing in the evening from the East, awaken the pagan in man,—the artist,—the lover of sheer beauty. And often, in contemplating this fascinating village, my fancy would westward wing itself. And my fellow man and the destiny of my race would no longer trouble me. The little lights behind the glass casements of the gabled houses, fixed and faint as the distant stars, are like so many diamonds in the crown of some sylvan goddess. And in places where the houses are crowded, piled above each other, a cascade of light in a frame of shimmering