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122 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1919
She sighed aloud and bent over her boy and whispered in his left ear: “My little son, I wish for you – I wish for you –” and as the beautiful music became fainter and fainter, she was frightened and said quickly: “ – I wish for you that everyone will love you.”
A southern province of our lovely star had suffered a great calamity. An earthquake accompanied by fearful thunderstorms and floods had destroyed three large villages together with all the farms and gardens, fields and woods. A great many people and animals had been killed and, saddest of all, there was a total lack of flowers in adequate quantity to wreathe the dead and appropriately adorn their last resting places.
Each phenomenon on earth is an allegory, and each allegory is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can pass into the interior of the world where you and I and day and night are all one. In the course of his life, every human being comes upon that open gate, here or there along the way; everyone is sometime assailed by the thought that everything visible is an allegory and that behind the allegory live spirit and eternal life. Few, to be sure, pass through the gate and give up the beautiful illusion for the surmised reality of what lies within.
