Reading section 6

280 Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love.

281 I have seen thee as the half-awakened child sees his mother in the dusk of the dawn and then smiles and sleeps again.

282 I shall die again and again to know that life is inexhaustible.

283 While I was passing with the crowd in the road I saw thy smile from the balcony and I sang and forgot all noise.

284 Love is life in its fulness like the cup with its wine.

285 They light their own lamps and sing their own words in their temples. But the birds sing thy name in thine own morning light,--for thy name is joy.

286 Lead me in the centre of thy silence to fill my heart with songs.

287 Let them live who choose in their own hissing world of fireworks. My heart longs for thy stars, my God.

288 Love's pain sang round my life like the unplumbed sea, and love's joy sang like birds in its flowering groves.

289 Put out the lamp when thou wishest. I shall know thy darkness and shall love it.

290 When I stand before thee at the day's end thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.

291 Some day I shall sing to thee in the sunrise of some other world, "I have seen thee before in the light of the earth, in the love of man."

292 Clouds come floating into my life from other days no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky.

293 Truth raises against itself the storm that scatters its seeds broadcast.

294 The storm of the last night has crowned this morning with golden peace.

295 Truth seems to come with its final word; and the final word gives birth to its next.

296 Blessed is he whose fame does not outshine his truth.

297 Sweetness of thy name fills my heart when I forget mine--like thy morning sun when the mist is melted.

298 The silent night has the beauty of the mother and the clamorous day of the child.

299 The world loved man when he smiled. The world became afraid of him when he laughed.

300 God waits for man to regain his childhood in wisdom.

301 Let me feel this world as thy love taking form, then my love will help it.

302 Thy sunshine smiles upon the winter days of my heart, never doubting of its spring flowers.

303 God kisses the finite in his love and man the infinite.

304 Thou crossest desert lands of barren years to reach the moment of fulfilment.

305 God's silence ripens man's thoughts into speech.

306 Thou wilt find, Eternal Traveller, marks of thy footsteps across my songs.

307 Let me not shame thee, Father, who displayest thy glory in thy children.

308 Cheerless is the day, the light under frowning clouds is like a punished child with traces of tears on its pale cheeks, and the cry of the wind is like the cry of a wounded world. But I know I am travelling to meet my Friend.

309 To-night there is a stir among the palm leaves, a swell in the sea, Full Moon, like the heart throb of the world. From what unknown sky hast thou carried in thy silence the aching secret of love?

310 I dream of a star, an island of light, where I shall be born and in the depth of its quickening leisure my life will ripen its works like the ricefield in the autumn sun.

311 The smell of the wet earth in the rain rises like a great chant of praise from the voiceless multitude of the insignificant.

312 That love can ever lose is a fact that we cannot accept as truth.

313 We shall know some day that death can never rob us of that which our soul has gained, for her gains are one with herself.

314 God comes to me in the dusk of my evening with the flowers from my past kept fresh in his basket.

315 When all the strings of my life will be tuned, my Master, then at every touch of thine will come out the music of love.

316 Let me live truly, my Lord, so that death to me become true.

317 Man's history is waiting in patience for the triumph of the insulted man.

318 I feel thy gaze upon my heart this moment like the sunny silence of the morning upon the lonely field whose harvest is over.

319 I long for the Island of Songs across this heaving Sea of Shouts.

320 The prelude of the night is commenced in the music of the sunset, in its solemn hymn to the ineffable dark.

321 I have scaled the peak and found no shelter in fame's bleak and barren height. Lead me, my Guide, before the light fades, into the valley of quiet where life's harvest mellows into golden wisdom.

322 Things look phantastic in this dimness of the dusk--the spires whose bases are lost in the dark and tree tops like blots of ink. I shall wait for the morning and wake up to see thy city in the light.

323 I have suffered and despaired and known death and I am glad that I am in this great world.

324 There are tracts in my life that are bare and silent. They are the open spaces where my busy days had their light and air.

325 Release me from my unfulfilled past clinging to me from behind making death difficult.

326 Let this be my last word, that I trust in thy love.