human
Of Nirvâna one carries away this one picture, painted in words curiously colourless and intangible--the picture of a mountain up whose steep side toil two creatures--the soul and his guide--toiling, stumbling upwards over a brittle and friable chaos of skulls. Skulls crumbled into powder and skulls crumbling mark out the road; 'and every skull,' says the guide, 'is yours, and has been yours in some past incarnation; and the dust that rises round your present body is the dust of your past and deserted bodies that have served you well or ill as may be in your past lives.' In the fine and bewildering haze of this thought we lose our poet, and henceforward he is not a face nor a voice, but an echo of a living man's voice. We hear the echo, but the voice we do not hear. And we grudge the voice, even to Nirvâna where all silences are merged in one.