My roses these, I cry, and my orange blossoms. But the goblin placed his hand upon my mouth, and I was dumb. The cyclamens, the anemones, the daisies, I saw them, but I could not speak to them. The goblin placed his hand upon my mouth, and I was dumb. O take me back to my own groves, I cried, or let me speak. But he threw me off his shoulders in a huff, among the daisies and the cyclamens. Alone among them, but I could not speak. He had tied my tongue, the goblin, and left me there alone. And in front of me, and towards me, and beside me, Walked Allah’s fairest cyclamens and anemones. I smell them, and the tears flow down my cheeks; I can not even like the noonday bulbul Whisper with my wings, salaam! I sit me on a bench and weep. And in my heart I sing O, let me be a burro-boy again; O, let me sleep among the cyclamens Of my own land.
Shades of Whitman! But Whitman, thou Donkey, never weeps. Whitman, if that goblin tried to silence him, would have wrung his neck, after he had ridden upon it.
The above, nevertheless, deserves the space we give it here, as it shadows forth one of the essential elements of Khalid’s spiritual makeup. But this slight symptom of that disease we named, this morbidness incident to adolescence, is eventually overcome by a dictionary and a grammar.
Ay, Khalid henceforth shall cease to scour the horizon for that vague something of his dreams; he has become farsighted enough by the process to see the necessity of pursuing in America something more spiritual than peddling crosses and scapulars. Especially in this America, where the alphabet is spread broadcast, and free of charge.