understand what pleasure streams from the sky in morning light,
and what delight that is that is which the summer breeze brings
to my body--when I kiss you to make you smile.


Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast
given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the
distant near and made a brother of the stranger.

I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter;
I forget that there abides the old in the new, and that there
also thou abidest.

Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever
thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my
endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the
unfamiliar.

When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is
shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of
the touch of the one in the play of many.


On the slope of the desolate river among tall grasses I asked
her, 'Maiden, where do you go shading your lamp with your mantle?
My house is all dark and lonesome--lend me your light!' she
raised her dark eyes for a moment and looked at my face through
the dusk. 'I have come to the river,' she said, 'to float my
lamp on the stream when the daylight wanes in the west.' I stood
alone among tall grasses and watched the timid flame of her lamp