Oh, if I had Orpheus' voice and poetry
with which to move the Dark Maid and her Lord,
I'd call you back, dear love, from the world below.
I'd go down there for you. Charon or the grim
King's dog could not prevent me then
from carrying you up into the fields of light.
--
l. 358.Euripides
Work me, lord. Please don't you leave me. I feel so useless down here with no one to love. Though I looked everywhere, and I can't find me anybody to love, to feel my care...So, work me lord, oh, use me lord. Can I show you how hard it is trying to live when you're all alone? Everyday I keep trying to move forward but something is driving me, oh, back. Something's trying to hold on to me, to my way of life. So, oh, don't you forget me down here lord, no no no no no, don't you forget me, lord. Well I don't think I'm any very special kind of person down here, I know better. But I don't think you're gonna find anybody, not anybody who can say that they tried like I tried. The worst that you can say all about me is that I'm never satisfied...
Janis Joplin
I've gone back to the Frick since then to look at her and at the two other Vermeers. Vermeers, after all, are hard to come by, and the one in Boston has been stolen. The other two are self-contained paintings. The people in them are looking at each other -- the lady and her maid, the soldier and his sweetheart. Seeing them is peeking at them through a hole in a wall. And the wall is made of light -- that entirely credible yet unreal Vermeer light. Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beauitful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat. The girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom.
Susanna Kaysen
"They didna speak, but they just gave one another a look, and I saw the love-light in their een." No more is remembered of these two, no being now living ever saw them, but the poetry that was in the soul of a battered weaver makes them human to us for ever.
It is of another minister I am to tell, but only to those who know that light when they see it. I am not bidding good-bye to many readers, for though it is true that some men, of whom Lord Rintoul was one, live to an old age without knowing love, few of us can have met them, and of women so incomplete I never heard.J. M. Barrie
May we feel after Thee; still calling out in the darkness, as children waking in the night call "Father," so may we call out for God; and, at times, even if we do not hear Thy voice, may there be the form of a hand resting upon us, and that shall be enough; for we shall take hold of it, though it be in the dark, and it shall guide us to the growing light; for the day shall come, and the release and triumph.
Henry Ward Beecher
Now for the other union. The first one sees God as infinitely lovable and beautiful; its aim is the contemplation of his attributes and perfections. The second union sees him as the creator, conserver, governor, redeemer, glorifier and vivifier of the whole world.
At certain moments, the spirit of the Lord will move and lead you towards this second union and you have to cooperate. He will be presented to you as the Lord, king and governor of the world, the Lord God of hosts, and wil take you to objects resembling this presence. Since the first union is not strengthened or prefected or completed except in the second, you need to start by this.Francisco Palau
Euripides
Eusebius of Caesarea
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