Hyperion to Bellarmin
Let’s forget that time exists and not count life’s days!
What are centuries to the moment when two beings so sense and near one another?
I still see the evening when Notara took me for the first time to her house.
She lived only a few hundred steps from us at the foot of the mountain.
Her mother was a thoughtful tender being, a simple cheerful lad the brother, and both conceded happily in all their doings that Diotima was the household’s queen.
Oh! everything was hallowed, made beautiful by her presence. Wherever I looked, whatever I touched, her carpet, her cushion, her little table, everything was in secret unison with her. And when she called me by name for the first time, when she even came so close to me that her innocent breath touched my listening being! —
We spoke very little together. You’re ashamed of your language. You’d like to become pure tone and blend with the other in one celestial song.
And what was there to speak of? It’s only each other we saw. To speak of ourselves we were shy.
We spoke at last of the life of the earth.
So fiery and childlike a hymn has never been sung to her.
It did us good to strew our hearts’ abundance in the good mother’s lap. We felt ourselves lightened like the trees when the summer wind shakes their fruitful branches and pours their sweet apples into the grass.
We called the earth one of the flowers of heaven, and heaven we called the infinite garden of life. As the roses gladden each other with golden dust, we said, so the heroic sunlight gladdens the earth with its rays; she is a glorious living being, we said, equally divine whether raging fire or mild clear water spring from her heart, ever happy whether she nourish herself on dew drops or storm clouds, prepared for her pleasure with heaven’s help, she, the ever more truly loving half of the sun-god, in the beginning more inly one with him perhaps, but then sundered from him by an almighty fate, so that she might seek him, come close, draw away, and in joy and grief ripen to supreme beauty.
So we spoke. I give you the substance, the spirit of it. But what’s that without the life?
It was growing dark and we had to leave. ‘Good night, you angel eyes!’ I thought in my heart, ‘and do soon appear to me again, lovely divine spirit, with your peace and fullness!’