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.
V
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.