THE END OF WINTER 27 



angelic functions. Along with the undertaker and the 

 gravedigger ranks the historian and others who seem to 

 bestow immortality. Each is like a child planting flowers 

 severed from their stalks and roots, expecting them to 

 grow. I never heard that the butterfly loved the chrysalis; 

 but I am sure that the caterpillar looks forward to an 

 endless day of eating green leaves and of continually 

 swelling until it would despise a consummation of the 

 size of a railway train. We can do the work of the 

 universe though we shed friends and country and house 

 and clothes and flesh, and become invisible to mortal eyes 

 and microscopes. We do it now invisibly, and it is not 

 these things which are us at all. That maid walking so 

 proudly is about the business of eternity. 



And yet it would be vain to pretend not to care about 

 the visible many-coloured raiment of which our houses, 

 our ships, our gardens, our books are part, since they also 

 have their immortal selves and their everlasting place, 

 else should we not love them with more than sight and 

 hearing and touch. For flesh loves flesh and soul loves 

 soul. Yet on this March day the supreme felicity is born 

 of the two loves, so closely interwoven that it is permitted 

 to forget the boundaries of the two, and for soul to love 

 flesh and flesh to love soul. And this ancient child is rid 

 of his dishonours and flits through the land floating on a 

 thin reed of the immortal laughter. This is " not alto- 

 gether fool." He is perchance playing some large 

 necessary part in the pattern woven by earth that draws 

 the gods to lean forward out of the heavens to watch the 

 play and say of him, as of other men, of birds, of flowers : 

 " They also are of our company." . . . 



