Page 1537 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

country town at the deathbed of his brother Nikolay. But
that had been grief— this was joy. Yet that grief and this
joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life;
they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life

through which there came glimpses of something sublime.
And in the contemplation of this sublime something the
soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had
before had no conception, while reason lagged behind,
unable to keep up with it.
‘Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!’ he repeated to
himself incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it
seemed, complete alienation from religion, that he turned
to God just as trustfully and simply as he had in his
childhood and first youth.
All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions.
One was away from her, with the doctor, who kept
smoking one fat cigarette after another and extinguishing
them on the edge of a full ash tray, with Dolly, and with
the old prince, where there was talk about dinner, about
politics, about Marya Petrovna’s illness, and where Levin
suddenly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt
as though he had waked up from sleep; the other was in
her presence, at her pillow, where his heart seemed
breaking and still did not break from sympathetic

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