Then I
turned to the pages still left in my hand, and read these words of my
father's:
'These marginalia are written for the eyes of my dear son, into whose
hands this copy of my book will come. Until he gave me his promise to
bury the amulet with me, I felt alone in the world. But even he
failed to understand what he called "my superstition." He did not
know that by perpetually feeling on my bosom the facets of the
beloved jewel which had long lain warm upon hers--the cross which had
received the last kiss from her lips--I had been able to focus all
the scattered rays of thought--I had been able to vitalise memory
till it became an actual presence. He did not know that out of my
sorrow had been born at last a strange kind of happiness--the
happiness that springs from loving a memory--living with a
memory--till it becomes a presence--an objective reality. He did not
know that, by holding her continually in my thoughts, by means of
the amulet, I achieved at last the miracle described by the Hindoo
poets--the miracle of reshaping from the undulations of "the three
regions of the universe the remembered object by the all-creative
magic of love!"'
Then followed some translations from the Kumara-sambhava and other
Sanscrit poems, and then the well-known passage in Lucretius about
dreams, and then a pathetic account of the visions called up within
him by the sensation caused by the lacerations of the facets of the
cherished amulet upon his bosom--visions something akin, as I
imagine, to those experienced by _convulsionnaires_.
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