... Here is the communing of a heart that stores up beauty; on the night of a feast it had this sweet outpouring, and a pen of delicate feeling set down its impressions

How generous you are, O heart, and how pure your giving...

You are generous — I know this in you..

You would flood the universe with what you store up...

You would have your overflowing never cease...

And how generous you were yesterday!..

How often you have astonished me..!

I knew you weighed down with pain — how then did your giving come out sweet and joyful..?

What magic hand drew joy and sweetness out of pain..?

Pain is sweet, delicious — perhaps you were given a handful of its sweetness?

Perhaps the butterflies that hovered near you were lured by the sweetness..

and sucked.. and sucked... without feeling that they were drawing in pain..!

Say, say, O heart.. did you glimpse in the fluttering of the butterflies' wings

the trace of the pain they sucked from you..?

Or did the sweetness intoxicate them, so that they never sensed its source...?

And these bright butterflies that danced upon the glow of the light...

how beautiful their colors, and how sweet their flutterings..

Tell me — is there not in their hearts some part of you..??

Perhaps you too sucked of their sweetness, and grew drunk, and forgot the source...?

And over there.. other butterflies, dreaming ones.. listening to the whisper of their sisters..

Each one at rest upon a flower sprung up in her heart...

I saw her, hovering... circling.. then alighting on her flower sprung up in her heart.. tinted with the colors of her flower.. and with the color of twilight she has tinted the border of her wings..!

And you, O heart — how gay are the colors of your pains! With what brush did you paint their threads..? From where did you draw their colors..? And what fingers caressed them..?

In the depths.. in the folds of my soul, you sprouted and made your home...

Perhaps your colors are drawn from my depths and from the folds of my soul..?

Pain has a delight — who can feel it..?

Pain sprouts in souls purer than the flowers on the hills.. and deeper than the secrets of existence...

And the owners of these souls lie hidden among the many of the others...

And beauty..? Is there not in the confiding of pain a beauty that bewitches the inner eye..?

I feel you, O my heart, overflowing with beauty.. your eyes fall on nothing but beauty..

In the face are two eyes that sometimes shun ugliness.. and are blinded by it..

But you, O heart, see nothing but beauty... and nothing clings to you from the canvases of life but the pictures of beauty..

My heart is stamped with beauty.. my heart is one of the hearts of the gods..! And therefore it sees nothing but beauty when it looks out..

Filth scratches my eyes.. yet my heart beats for a beauty that appears filthy..!

I would have liked to give the butterflies — those dreaming upon the fragrance of their flowers and those dancing upon the glow of their light — to drink.. from the springs of my heart welling up in my depths...

I wished to give them beauty to drink, as the gods sip it...

I wished to pour over their sweetness a sweetness from my heart...

I would have loved to teach them the speech of beauty..

And of what does beauty speak? And what does it utter..?

Beauty has a language.. whose branches spring from love..

As for its symbols and expressions, they change and alter..

The wellspring is one... the outpouring of a generous giving,

and the more it gives.. the more abundant grows its flow...

Had the butterflies had what I wished for them, the universe would have danced upon the fragrance of their beauty...

Had they had some little part of my heart.. the longing for lights coming from afar — from the depths of souls — would have wounded them..!

Would that I had vanquished the spider... would that I had poured into their spirits all that is in my spirit..

and quenched my everlasting longing to fill their hearts to overflowing with beauty...

*

And I felt you, O heart, a caged bird wanting to break loose.. wanting to fly out.. to the huts of the wretched.. to flood their hearts with consolation.. to be food for the deprived.. and warmth for those shivering with cold.. and solace for children in their long, hollow nights.. and balm for wounded souls...

I felt you straining.. as though you were liberty itself in its leaps..

wanting to smash the chains.. and vanquish tyranny.. and strangle falsehood..!

I felt you writhing in sorrow at being denied the delight of giving...

It was for me to leave you, though you were unwilling..

to release you wherever you wished.. to quench your thirst from the outpourings of your own goodness...

You are a small, beating thing.. yet the universe falls short of bearing your beats..!