e who sought with both heart
and mind, using Nature and experience as a guide?

It was all so obvious and clear; how could anyone not see it? Yet now
he, Olaf Augustine Brunner, must take this lesson and apply it to that
Universe, often cold and unreasoning, OUT THERE. He did not know if he
was equal to the task. He only knew that he must try.

His mind and confidence thus piqued, he turned back to the poems
written earlier, hoping, perhaps, to find some further sign of his own
understanding---something to set against the huge, dark uncertainty
beyond his window. There were the two from the previous night, as well
as the poem to his wife.

NIGHT

Sipping sadness, from the young girl
So afraid to go unnoticed

Young man, stalking forests in his dreams
Heightens all his senses
to you.

Madman, racing knives across a windstorm
Searching
For the blood that he will spill.

..................

EVIL

Rising slowly
hideous figure
cast aside
Black with bitter
twisted passions
seeking only

The murder of a child.

............................

And the last, to his wife:

PLIGHTED TROTH

Ara
What is my life without you?
To be your knight
to fight for you
Is all that holds my will together
Unraveled, and dispossessed
by Distance, time and empty suffering

Now you are taken from me,
One comfort only can I find:
That I loved you then, not less than now
And thanked dear Heaven
you were mine.

............................

A year, a month, a day ago he might have cried; but this was not the
time. Emotion and sentiment would not bring her back to him, nor would
dashing his heart upon the rocks. The mind was the stronger instrument
now, a bit cold, but maybe that was best. He gave it free rein to
pursue its ends.

The poems showed him that indeed, both elements, love and hatred,
yielding and aggression, lived inside him. And both were needed.
Hadn't he felt them? Hadn't their