Shubin leaped on to his feet and walked twice up and down, but
Bersenyev bent his head, and his face was overcast by a faint flush.

'I don't altogether agree with you,' he began: 'nature does not always
urge us ... towards love.' (He could not at once pronounce the word.)
'Nature threatens us, too; she reminds us of dreadful . . . yes,
insoluble mysteries. Is she not destined to swallow us up, is she not
swallowing us up unceasingly? She holds life and death as well; and
death speaks in her as loudly as life.'

'In love, too, there is both life and death,' interposed Shubin.

'And then,' Bersenyev went on: 'when I, for example, stand in the
spring in the forest, in a green glade, when I can fancy the romantic
notes of Oberon's fairy horn' (Bersenyev was a little ashamed when he
had spoken these words)--'is that, too----'

'The thirst for love, the thirst for happiness, nothing more!' broke
in Shubin. 'I, too, know those notes, I know the languor and the
expectation which come upon the soul in the forest's shade, in its
deep recesses, or at evening in the open fields when the sun sets and
the river mist rises behind the bushes. But forest, and river, and
fields, and sky, every cloud and every blade of grass sets me
expecting, hoping for happiness, I feel the approach, I hear the voice
of happiness calling in everything. "God of my worship, bright and
gay!" That was how I tried to begin my sole poem; you must own it's a
splendid first line, but I could never produce a second. Happiness!
happiness! as long as life is not over, as long as we have the use of
all our limbs, as long as we are going up, not down, hill! Damn it