to know.

When he awoke, all the angels were starting up wide awake too.
He expected to see them lift their tools, but no, the time for play
had come. They looked happier than ever, and each began to sing
where he stood. He had not heard them sing before.

"Now," he thought, "I shall know what kind of nonsense the angels
sing when they are merry. They don't drive cabs, I see, but they
dig for stars, and they work hard enough to be merry after it."

And he did hear some of the angels' nonsense; for if it was all
sense to them, it had only just as much sense to Diamond as made
good nonsense of it. He tried hard to set it down in his mind,
listening as closely as he could, now to one, now to another,
and now to all together. But while they were yet singing he began,
to his dismay, to find that he was coming awake--faster and faster.
And as he came awake, he found that, for all the goodness of his memory,
verse after verse of the angels' nonsense vanished from it.
He always thought he could keep the last, but as the next began he
lost the one before it, and at length awoke, struggling to keep hold
of the last verse of all. He felt as if the effort to keep from
forgetting that one verse of the vanishing song nearly killed him.
And yet by the time he was wide awake he could not be sure of that even.
It was something like this:


White hands of whiteness
Wash the stars' faces,
Till glitter, glitter, glit, goes their brightness