Little Poems in Prose

IX THE BAD GLAZIER THERE are natures which are purely con- templative and altogether unfitted for action, yet which, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a rashness of which they would have believed themselves to be incapable. One such, fearing to find some disappoint- ing intelligence at the porter’s lodge, hangs about for an hour without daring to go home; another keeps a letter for a fortnight without unsealing it, or only makes up his mind after six months to take some step which was nec- essary a year before: such feel themselves sometimes hurried brusquely into action by an irresistible force, like the arrow from a bow. The moralist and the doctor, who set up to know everything, cannot explain whence comes so suddenly so mad an energy to flood these lazy and self-indulgent souls, and how, incapable as they are of accomplishing the most simple and necessary things, they find, at a certain moment, an ecstatic courage to exe-