arkness envelops us. We are divinely
alone, the heavens have fallen on our heads."

The heavens have fallen on our heads! What a tremendous idea! It is
the loftiest cry that life hurls. That was the cry of deliverance for
which I had been groping until then. I had had a foreboding it would
come, because a thing of glory like a poet's song always gives
something to us poor living shadows, and human thought always reveals
the world. But I needed to have it said explicitly so as to bring
human misery and human grandeur together. I needed it as a key to the
vault of the heavens.

These heavens, that is to say, the azure that our eyes enshrine,
purity, plenitude--and the infinite number of suppliants, the sky of
truth and religion. All this is within us, and has fallen upon our
heads. And God Himself, who is all these kinds of heavens in one, has
fallen on our heads like thunder, and His infinity is ours.

We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its
toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine. However wrong
we may go in the dark, whatever our efforts in the dark and the useless
work of our hearts working incessantly, and whatever our ignorance left
to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we
ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion. It is this sentiment
that lights our foreheads, uplifts our souls, adorns our pride, and, in
spite of everything, will console us when we shall become accustomed to
holding, each at his own poor task, the whole place that God used to
occupy. The truth itself gives an effective, practical, and, so to
speak, religious caress to the suppliant in whom the heavens spread.

. . . . .

"I have such respect for the actual truth that there are moments when I
do not dare to call things by their name," the poet ended.

"Yes," said Amy, very softly, and nothing else. She had been listening
intently. Everything seemed to be carried away in a sort of gentle
whirlwind.

"Amy," he whispered.

She did not stir. She had fallen asleep with her head on her lover's
knees. He looked at her and smiled. An expression of pity and
benevolence flitted across his face. His hands stretched out part way
toward the sleeping woman with the gentleness of strength. I saw the
glorious pride of condescension and charity in this man whom a woman
prostrate before him deified.

CHAPTER XVII

I have given notice. I am going away