You will become absorbed, and,
with your love realized, the whole rhapsodic life of this world will
mingle you forever in its tide of song and science and labor.'
"'Yes,' I answered, 'I am sure I shall. For whatever period of time I
stay here, I am one with this beautiful and strange life. I respond
naturally to all this serenity and joy, this precision of power over
inanimate things; this flooded being and the dawning sense that through
the stepping stone of Mars, I approach yet higher beatitudes of living.
At least in Mars the sordid taint of suffering, of ignominious physical
torture and privation, which spoiled the Earth, is almost unknown.'
"Chapman laughed, and an echo gave back from some hillside its musical
response. 'Ah, it may be, I know it is true, and yet--and yet--the Earth
possessed a pictorial, a dramatic power in its contrasts of happiness
and suffering, of goodness and sin. It had literary material. Its
consecutive growth in the ages of social and national and economic
history were so wonderful, so thrilling in interest, in the details of
character and adventure, in the incessant panoramic display it gave of
light and shade. And on it rested the shadow of a strange, pathetic
doubt, the mystery of creation. Its romance, its fiction, its fable, and
the animating picture it furnished, with its sceptics and its
believers, its haters and its lovers, its tyrants and its heroes. Its
wide, verbal immensity! I miss all that, or almost all.
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