Tears Held Back

I witnessed a tear — in its burning shone the ardor of nobility and sacrifice — in a wide dark eye, in whose English blue swam the ripples of emotion set free, its lids girdled with black lashes within which trembled a deep well of feeling, pondering the wonders of chance and the strangeness of fate!

I witnessed it in the eye of the Western bride who comes with my brother as her bridegroom — wandering in her sweet pupil, wrought of longing for her country; and love of homeland burst into flame in my soul, and I fancied I had a mouth to kiss a thousand countries and press its lips to a thousand lands!

The bride of brides, in the bloom of her youth, wept with longing, and made my own loneliness weep; and I felt my way over the places of my country, stumbling and trembling, and I took up the little stones and embraced them, and smiled, entranced, at the children of our quarter, and set out grain before our birds, and then pressed myself to the breast of my land, crying: I am the happy one — she who has a homeland!

And I turned to wipe her sadness from her polished brow and to say:

You are the daughter of the homeland over which "love" has scattered its fragrance!

You are the sister of dreams and enchantments, the granddaughter of the moon and the stars; and your great homeland is eternal and knows no perishing, for the structure of its land is of tenderness and affection, and its vast thickets are of the plant of longings and the pangs of enchantment!

You are no stranger, so long as in your heart the two immortals speak: the call of motherhood and the whisper of tenderness.

So melt, like the immortal women, into the mold of what you love, and make yourself like the still waters, fit for every land, seeking between refreshment and clarity as they seep into every place!

The homeland of your soil melts and dwindles before grasping and dominion, but the homeland of your heart grows boundless in majesty before the sincerity and faithfulness you give!

And if the voice of the growing civilization of your country resounds in your imagination, and the pictures of museums and arts and the monuments of city and building press upon your sight... then remember how much these glories are the prey of extinction! How much they are ruin in the hand of hatred and strife; how many wars they have kindled, how much envy they have stirred, how many lives they have destroyed and souls they have snuffed out! And how trivial they are beside what you yourself possess: the crown of love, set with chrysolite and rubies!

You are the daughter of the homeland whose side all homelands trust; the girl of the country of love, in which frontiers shrink and barriers perish, and before which the humiliation of chains and walls rolls away!

You are a citizen of wondrous love!

And on the day when hatred rings out as banners marching in men's breasts, hunting out thrones to raze them, and the elements of evil rumble, screaming in the belly of the earth and filling the face of the seas, paining, destroying, wounding —

then you will roam at ease in the breadth of peace, and pass your white hand over the seat of humanity within you, over the heart in which the powers of love muster; and you will fill it to the brim with the songs of enchantment, and tell it the stories of the tears that once turned to stone in its farthest depths! And you will bless its abundant soil, unstained by aggression and denial, and rest secure in its fertility, its overflowing, its heights, for it stands above small things and hatreds and evils!

The great homelands are struck down with vainglory and pride, and the small homelands are felled by dominion and conquest; both are threatened with extinction, both burdened by the lava of nationalism, in which patriotism goes barren, hungry and stubborn, quenched by nothing but blood and torn flesh! But your homeland, O bride of hearts, grows by eager mutual attraction, and sets on the mouth of life the roses of ascent, and carves out of bounty ornaments of feeling and delight!

Homelands grow young and grow old, then crumble away dead; but your homeland alone knows no ending, for its dreaming selfhood is drawn from feeling, and that prodigious feeling pulses from the immortality of the heart and enters into the everlastingness of that steadfast organ!

If one day you recall your people's step toward glory, do not forget its many steps that stumbled over skulls and bones; and if the hymns of victory and the songs of pride flutter in your mind, then remember the precious powers that flowed out upon the blades of death, and the blood of life that ran in rivers through the plains of nothingness!

Then you will hold sway, firm in safety, in the airs of the great love; and beneath your world will sink little states, earnest and striving, and the limbs of awesome states will be shattered, and broken chivalry will surge, and jealous hearts will weep over the good of a homeland that knows no flourishing except upon the ruin of another homeland!

You are the wife who tomorrow will carry the scepter of motherhood; and then like the goddesses — like the goddesses themselves — you will become: creating, destroying, merciful, awesome... And how magnificent is what the goddesses lavish, when they will to give! You are she who will give intelligence and acumen and knowledge and the strong feeling by which one perceives what life holds of sweetness and bitterness, delight and sorrow!

From your dutiful hand will come forth dear souls, with all that besets them of dim inclinations and sharp desires!

What homeland, then, would not enfold you in its depths; and which of them would not claim you as its own, O majestic one, lost in love?

Today you are a houri whom the principality of love lifts to its radiance; you are a magical citizen for whom history keeps a line of ancestors — of those who filled life with rapture, since they loved with that tender, violent power of attraction which bound the wounds of their hearts and consoled the pains of their spirits: one of them flung away a kingdom, and others left homeland and kin! So that commoners and subjects, kings and nobles came to stand on one and the same ancient ground, the cradle of mutual sympathy!

In what kingdom could these be equals? In what homeland do Samson and Jamil and Qays and the "Duke of Windsor" stand alike? And where does the daughter of al-Mahdi meet Beatrice and Isolde and George Sand? Where is the playfulness of resolve, the laughter of choice, and the ringing laugh of the will, save in your world? And where do the secrets of paradise dwell, and the hymns of glances, and the anthems of the soul, save in your world!

O favored bride!