grow!
When it has blossomed it will haply die.
Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep,
Bedded in dead denial yet some while...
Oh, yet a little while, a little while.'

"I folded the book on my thumb and sat there silent and without moving
for a long time. I was stunned by the clearness of vision the verse
had imparted to me. It was illumination. It was like a bolt of God's
lightning in the Pit. They would keep Love, the fickle sprite, the
forerunner of young life--young life that is imperative to be born!

"I conned the lines over in my mind--'Not yet, sometime'--'O Love, not
yet'--'Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep.' And I laughed
aloud, ha, ha! I saw with white vision their blameless souls. They were
children. They did not understand. They played with Nature's fire and
bedded with a naked sword. They laughed at the gods. They would stop
the cosmic sap. They had invented a system, and brought it to the
gaming-table of life, and expected to win out. 'Beware!' I cried. 'The
gods are behind the table. They make new rules for every system that is
devised. You have no chance to win.'

"But I did not so cry to them. I waited. They would learn that their
system was worthless and throw it away. They would be content with
whatever happiness the gods gave them and not strive to wrest more away.

"I watched. I said nothing. The months continued to come and go, and
still the famine-edge of their love grew the sharper. Never did they
dull it with a permitted love-clasp. They ground and whetted it on
self-denial, and sharper and sharper it grew. This went on until even I
doubted. Did the gods sleep? I wondered. Or were they dead? I laughed
to myself. The man and the woman had made a miracle. They had outwitted
God. They had shamed the flesh, and blackened the face of the good Earth
Mother. They had played with her fire and not been burned. They were
immune. They were themselves gods, knowing good from evil and tasting
not. 'Was this the way gods came to be?' I asked myself. 'I am a frog,'
I said. 'But for my mud-lidded eyes I should have been blinded by the
brightness of this wonder I have witnessed. I have puffed myself up with
my wisdom and passed judgment upon gods.'

"Yet even in this, my latest wisdom, I was wrong. They were not gods.
They were man and woman--soft clay that sighed and thrilled, shot
through with desire, thumbed with strange weaknesses which the gods have
not."

C