love, and it longs to speak.

"Come, thou final word! Come, thou crown of speech! Come, thou charm
of peace! Open the gates of our hearts. Lift the weight of our joy
and bear it upward.

"For all good gifts, for all perfect gifts, for love, for life, for
the world, we praise, we bless, we thank--"

As a soaring bird, struck by an arrow, falls headlong from the sky,
so the song of Hermas fell. At the end of his flight of gratitude
there was nothing--a blank, a hollow space.

He looked for a face, and saw a void. He sought for a hand, and
clasped vacancy. His heart was throbbing and swelling with passion;
the bell swung to and fro within him, beating from side to side as
if it would burst; but not a single note came from it. All the
fulness of his feeling, that had risen upward like a living
fountain, fell back from the empty sky, as cold as snow, as hard as
hail, frozen and dead. There was no meaning in his happiness. No one
had sent it to him. There was no one to thank for it. His felicity
was a closed circle, a wall of eternal ice.

"Let us go back," he said sadly to Athenais; "the child is heavy
upon my shoulder. We will lay him to sleep, and go into the library.
The air grows chilly. We were mistaken. The gratitude of life is
only a dream. There is no one to thank."

And in the garden it was already night.