It’s time indeed I stole to bed.
How peacefully the house is sleeping!
Ah! why should I strange fortunes plan?
To guard the dear ones in my keeping–
That’s task enough for any man.
So through dim seas I’ll ne’er go spoiling;
The red Tortugas never roam;
Please God! I’ll keep the pot a-boiling,
And make at least a happy home.
My children’s path shall gleam with roses,
Their grace abound, their joy increase.
And so my Hour divinely closes
With tender thoughts of praise and peace.
II
The Garden of the Luxembourg,
Late July 1914.
When on some scintillating summer morning I leap lightly up to the seclusion of my garret, I often think of those lines: “In the brave days when I was twenty-one.”
True, I have no loving, kind Lisette to pin her petticoat across the pane, yet I do live in hope. Am I not in Bohemia the Magical, Bohemia of Murger, of de Musset, of Verlaine? Shades of Mimi Pinson, of Trilby, of all that immortal line of laughterful grisettes, do not tell me that the days of love and fun are forever at an end!
Yes, youth is golden, but what of age? Shall it too not testify to the rhapsody of existence? Let the years between be those of struggle, of sufferance–of disillusion if you will; but let youth and age affirm the ecstasy of being.
