The mother has no more milk, the new-born babe is dying.
I know nothing about that, but just look at this wonderful rosette which a slice of wood-cells of the pine presents under the microscope!
Compare the most beautiful Mechlin lace to that if you can!
These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac thrives with them to such a point that it prevents their seeing the weeping child.
God eclipses their souls. This is a family of minds which are, at once, great and petty. Horace was one of them; so was Goethe.
La Fontaine perhaps; magnificent egoists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of sorrow, who do not behold Nero if the weather be fair, for whom the sun conceals the funeral pile, who would look on at an execution by the guillotine in the search for an effect of light, who hear neither the cry nor the sob, nor the death rattle, nor the alarm peal, for whom everything is well, since there is a month of May, who, so long as there are clouds of purple and gold above their heads, declare themselves content, and who are determined to be happy until the radiance of the stars and the songs of the birds are exhausted.
These are dark radiances.
They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied.
Certainly they are so.
He who does not weep does not see.