All has been felt, all has been gone through...
I am weary. What to me now that at this moment,
larger, fiercer than ever, the sunset floods the heavens
as though aflame with some triumphant passion?
What to me that, amid the soft peace and glow of evening,
suddenly, two paces hence, hidden in a thick bush’s
dewy stillness, a nightingale has sung his heart out
in notes magical as though no nightingale had been
on earth before him, and he first sang the first song
of first love? All this was, has been, has been
again, and is a thousand times repeated—and
to think that it will last on so to all eternity—as
though decreed, ordained—it stirs one’s
wrath! Yes... wrath!
Ah, I am grown old! Such thoughts would never
have come to me once—in those happy days
of old, when I too was aflame like the sunset and my
heart sang like the nightingale.
There is no hiding it—everything has faded
about me, all life has paled. The light that
gives life’s colours depth and meaning—the
light that comes out of the heart of man—is
dead within me.... No, not dead yet—it
feebly smoulders on, giving no light, no warmth.
Once, late in the night in Moscow, I remember I went
up to the grating window of an old church, and leaned
against the faulty pane. It was dark under the
low arched roof—a forgotten lamp shed a
dull red light upon the ancient picture; dimly could
be discerned the lips only of the sacred face—stern
and sorrowful. The sullen darkness gathered about
it, ready it seemed to crush under its dead weight
the feeble ray of impotent light.... Such now
in my heart is the light; and such the darkness.
And this I write to thee, to thee, my one never forgotten
friend, to thee, my dear companion, whom I have left
for ever, but shall not cease to love till my life’s
end.... Alas! thou knowest what parted us.
But that I have no wish to speak of now. I have
left thee... but even here, in these wilds, in this
far-off exile, I am all filled through and through
with thee; as of old I am in thy power, as of old I
feel the sweet burden of thy hand on my bent head!
For the last time I drag myself from out the grave
of silence in which I am lying now. I turn a
brief and softened gaze on all my past... our past....
No hope and no return; but no bitterness is in my heart
and no regret, and clearer than the blue of heaven,
purer than the first snow on mountain tops, fair memories
rise up before me like the forms of departed gods....
They come, not thronging in crowds, in slow procession
they follow one another like those draped Athenian
figures we admired so much—dost thou remember?—in
the ancient bas-reliefs in the Vatican.
