d knee when they have found it, is a short passage, a
line, half a line, on which an imperceptible hint of profound passion,
or the most fleeting phase, though unexpressed, of love in joy, in
suffering or in death has left its impress. Thus at the beginning of
humanity each tint of the dawn or the dusk, each hour of the day was,
for the first man who gave it a name, a new solar god who soon possessed
worshippers, priests and temples of his own. But to analyse sensations
after the manner of the old-fashioned erotic writers gives us no
trouble. The real difficulty and merit lie in gathering along with our
mystics, from the lowest depths of sorrow, its flowers of ecstasy, the
pearls and coral that lie at the bottom of its sea, and to enrich the
soul in its own eyes. Our purest poetry thus joins hands with our most
profound psychology. One is the oracle, the other the dogma of one and
the same religion.

And yet is it credible? In spite of its beauty, harmony and incomparable
charm, our society has also its malcontents. There are here and there
certain recusants who declare they are soaked and saturated with the
essence, so remarkably pure and so much above proof, of our excessive
and compulsory society. They find our realm of beauty too static, our
atmosphere of happiness too tranquil. In vain to please them we vary
from time to time the intensity and colouring of our illuminations and
ventilate our colonnades with a kind of refreshing breeze. They persist
in condemning as monotonous our day devoid of clouds or night; our year,
devoid of seasons; our towns devoid of country-life. Very curiously when
the month of May comes round, this feeling of restlessness which they
alone experience at ordinary times, becomes contagious and well-nigh
general. And so it is the most melancholy and least busy month of the
year. One would say that the Spring driven from every place, from the
gloomy immensity of the heavens and from the frozen surface of the earth
has, as we, sought refuge under ground; or rather that her wandering
ghost returns at stated seasons to visit us and tantalise us by her
haunting presence. It is then that the city of the musicians grows full
and their music becomes so sweet, pathetic, mournful, and desperately
harrowing that we see lovers by hundreds at a time take each other by
the hand and go up to gaze upon the death-dealing sky.... In reference
to this I ought to say that there was recently a false alarm caused