* * * * *

Again New York and Night and Harlem.  A dark city of fifty thousand rises like magic from the earth.  Gone is the white world, the pale lips, the lank hair; gone is the West and North—­the East and South is here triumphant.  The street is crowd and leisure and laughter.  Everywhere black eyes, black and brown, and frizzled hair curled and sleek, and skins that riot with luscious color and deep, burning blood.  Humanity is packed dense in high piles of close-knit homes that lie in layers above gray shops of food and clothes and drink, with here and there a moving-picture show.  Orators declaim on the corners, lovers lark in the streets, gamblers glide by the saloons, workers lounge wearily home.  Children scream and run and frolic, and all is good and human and beautiful and ugly and evil, even as Life is elsewhere.

* * * * *

And then—­the Veil.  It drops as drops the night on southern seas—­vast, sudden, unanswering.  There is Hate behind it, and Cruelty and Tears.  As one peers through its intricate, unfathomable pattern of ancient, old, old design, one sees blood and guilt and misunderstanding.  And yet it hangs there, this Veil, between Then and Now, between Pale and Colored and Black and White—­between You and Me.  Surely it is a thought-thing, tenuous, intangible; yet just as surely is it true and terrible and not in our little day may you and I lift it.  We may feverishly unravel its edges and even climb slow with giant shears to where its ringed and gilded top nestles close to the throne of God.  But as we work and climb we shall see through streaming eyes and hear with aching ears, lynching and murder, cheating and despising, degrading and lying, so flashed and fleshed through this vast hanging darkness that the Doer never sees the Deed and the Victim knows not the Victor and Each hates All in wild and bitter ignorance.  Listen, O Isles, to these Voices from within the Veil, for they portray the most human hurt of the Twentieth Cycle of that poor Jesus who was called the Christ!

* * * * *

There is something in the nature of Beauty that demands an end.  Ugliness may be indefinite.  It may trail off into gray endlessness.  But Beauty must be complete—­whether it be a field of poppies or a great life,—­it must end, and the End is part and triumph of the Beauty.  I know there are those who envisage a beauty eternal.  But I cannot.  I can dream of great and never-ending processions of beautiful things and visions and acts.  But each must be complete or it cannot for me exist.

On the other hand, Ugliness to me is eternal, not in the essence but in its incompleteness; but its eternity does not daunt me, for its eternal unfulfilment is a cause of joy.  There is in it nothing new or unexpected; it is the old evil stretching out and ever seeking the end it cannot find; it may coil and writhe and recur in endless battle to days without end, but it is the same human ill and bitter hurt.  But Beauty is fulfilment.  It satisfies.  It is always new and strange.  It is the reasonable thing.  Its end is Death—­the sweet silence of perfection, the calm and balance of utter music.  Therein is the triumph of Beauty.