They are affection and the present since they opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer, they who purified drink and food, they who are the charm of fleeting places and the superhuman deliciousness of staying still. They are affection and the future, strength and love that we, standing amid rage and troubles, see passing in the storm-rent sky and on banners of ecstasy.

They are love, perfect and reinvented measurement, wonderful and unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine beloved for its fatal qualities. We have all experienced the terror of their yielding and of our own: O enjoyment of our health, surge of our faculties, egoistic affection and passion for them, they who love us for their infinite life.

And we remember them and they travel... And if the Adoration goes away, resounds, its promise resounds: “Away with those superstitions, those old bodies, those couples and those ages. It’s this age that has sunk!”

They won’t go away, nor descend from a heaven again; they won’t accomplish the redemption of women’s anger and the gaiety of men and of all that sin: for it is now accomplished, with them being, and being loved.

O their breaths, their heads, their racing; the terrible swiftness of the perfection of forms and of action.
O fecundity of the spirit and immensity of the universe!
This body! The dreamed-of release, the shattering of grace crossed with new violence!
The sight, the sight of them! all the ancient kneeling and suffering lifted in their wake.
This day! the abolition of all resonant and surging suffering in more intense music.
Their footstep! migrations more vast than ancient invasions.
O them and us! pride more benevolent than wasted charities.
O world! and the clear song of new misfortunes!

They have known us all and loved us all. Let us, on this winter night, from cape to cape, from the tumultuous pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, from glance to glance, our strengths and feelings numb, learn to hail them and see them, and send them back, and under the tides and at the summit of snowy deserts, follow their seeing, their breathing, their body, their day.