Sweet are the uses of Life.

The morning breaks again over the world as a thousand and a million times before;

The light flows rippling in, and up to the window-pane, and passes through and touches the eyelids of the sleeper.

* * * * *

It says: “Come forth, I have something to show you.”

And the sleeper arises and goes forth—and everything is the same as yesterday.

Then he says to the light, “You have deceived me, there is nothing new here”—so he goes back sullenly to his chamber.

But the light is not huffed, but comes again next morning (thinks nothing of the long journey across) and slips through the window-pane and touches the sleeper’s eyelids as before, “Come forth, I have something to show you;”

And again the next morning, and the next, and the next.

And the sleeper wonders whatever the light would be at, but the latter says nothing—only fails not to keep his self-made appointment.

* * * * *

Then after many years, after many thousands of years—

After many times lying down to sleep and rising again, after many times entering again into the mother’s womb, after often passing through the gates of birth and death—the sleeper says to him that awakes him:

“Ah! beautiful one, ah! prince of love, so many times with thy fingers in vain touching my closed lids!

Now at last thy love pouring in upon me has found an entrance, and filling my body breaks the bounds of it, and bursts forth back again into the regions whence thou comest.

Ah! prince of love, lord of heaven, most beautiful one, of thee I am enamored and overcome with love;

Beholding thy beauty, hearing the words that thou sayest to me, being touched with the nearness of thy breath and the divine odor which exhales from thee—being sick, constrained with love, rending the chains which detain me—

Henceforth the long chain of births and deaths I abandon, I arise and go forth with thee—to begin my real life.”