Is it a generous, forbearing emotion peering forth in utmost modesty and shyness, or an overpowering, virginal confession which native literary refinement whispers, as a secret care, into the ear of one grown delicate of feeling and humble of spirit?!
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I came to know you, O my refiner, and everything in you drove new life into the folds of my soul!
And I busied myself searching out your world... how might I find a sickle of the spirit to cleave your hardness?
And there appeared to me in you those opposing, contradictory traits, strange in their harshness and their gentleness — the ones
that carry you far into hurting, so that you pain and torment, and then you stand in sympathy with a thousand sorrows, saying with rare nobility: "Would that upon my shoulder the cares might be borne."
I used to imagine that your melancholy held the desolation of the deserts and the sorrows of autumn, and my bewilderment at you grew, O you domineering conqueror! How did pain never touch your steadfastness? How did melancholy bring you nothing but greater balance? And how were you able to take possession of the world with your heart, in a poetic union and in a lavish giving of self to every suffering, wretched, sorrowing soul?
Was it for your sake that ardent longing gnawed at me and grief burst forth from me, day after day?
Why was it that whenever I heard you speak, my reverence was stirred? And why did I permit myself, in illusion and vanity, to imagine that in each of us was what the other held of feelings and thoughts? But the thoughts in you were awake and articulate, until it seemed that each single sentence had been fashioned to drive me to amazement at your skill in setting before me, in difficult words, the movement of the gentle soul and the course of the blazing mind!
What was this thing that made me pity those who did not know you, as though the splendor embodied in your person were something so captivating that it could never be repeated in another, until I came to think that ignorance of you was poverty and bondage... Was it that quickness of wit that made you, in my eyes, supreme and unique? Or was it nothing beside your rare imagination and your wondrous brilliance?!
Why did my soul come to delight in humbling itself before that proud one who was so refined in shunning the places of disgrace, who saved me from the yoke of sloth, and taught me to seek eminence in the shadow of strength and steadfastness, so that I wiped away my tears and repeated to
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