Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now: the frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move:
The thunder is the thundering of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us til we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul-size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
"Tell me the weight of a snowflake," a coal-mouse asked a wild dove. "Nothing more than nothing," was the answer.
"In that case I must tell you a marvelous story," the coal-mouse said. "I sat on a branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow, not heavily, not in a giant blizzard, no, just like in a dream, without any violence. Since I didn't have anything better to do, I counted the snow-flakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the next snowflake dropped onto the branch–nothing more than nothing, as you say–the branch broke off."
Having said that, the coal-mouse flew away. The dove, since Noah's time an authority on the matter; thought about the story for a while and finally said to herself: "Perhaps there is only one person's voice lacking for peace to come about in the world."