[Transcriber's Note:

 Greek words in this text have been transliterated into English and are found within { } brackets. ]

 Apologia Diffidentis

 _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

 Sirenica

 Apologia Diffidentis

 By W. Compton Leith

 London: John Lane, The Bodley Head. New York: John Lane Company MCMXVII

 _Third Edition_

 _Printed in Great Britain by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh_

 To One Whose Friendship is beyond Desert and above Requital

Apologia Diffidentis

 "I am naturally bashful; nor hath conversation, age, or travel been able to effront or enharden me. "

 SIR THOMAS BROWNE

In the matter of avowals the diffident never speak if they can write. That is why my apology for a furtive existence is here set down insolitude instead of being told face to face. You have borne so manyyears with my unresponsive and incomprehensible ways that shame at lastconstrains me to this poor defence; for I must either justify myself inyour sight, or go far away where even your kindness cannot reach me. Thefirst alternative is hard, but the second too grievous for impairedpowers of endurance; I must therefore find what expression I may, andtell you how my life has been beshrewed ever since, a boy of twelve, Ifirst incurred the obloquy of being shy. The word slips easily from thepen though the lips refuse to frame it; for I think most men wouldrather plead guilty to a vice than to this weakness. 

A doom of reticence is upon all our shy confraternity, and we seldommake confidences even to each other. It is only at rarest intervals thatthe spell is lifted, by silent sympathy, by a smile, by a tear, by Iknow not what. At such times our souls are like those deep pools of theshore, only open to the sky at lowest tides of still summer days, onlyto be approached across long stretches of wet sand and slippery shelvesof rock. In their depths are delicate fronded seaweeds and shells tintedwith hues of sundawn; but to see them you must bend low over thesurface, which no lightest breath must furrow, or the vision is gone. 

Few of the busy toilers of the world will leave the firm sands to see solittle; but sometimes one weary of keen life will stray aside, andoftener a child will come splashing across the beach to peer down withartless curiosity and delight. Then the jealous ocean returns, and thestill clear depths are confused once more with refluent waters; soon thewaves are tossing above the quiet spot, and the child is gone home tosleep and forget. I cannot have you with me at these still hours ofrevelation; I must tell my tale as best I can with such success asfortune may bestow. 

I shall say nothing of the miseries which embittered the life of thediffident boy. But I cannot pass in silence the deeper trouble ofearliest manhood, when my soul first awoke to the dread that thoughother clouds might drift westward and dissolve, one would impend over mefor ever. It was at the university that this vague misgiving crept uponme like a chill mist, until the hopes and aspirations of youth were oneby one extinguished, as to a sailor putting out to sea the comfortableharbour lights vanish in the wracks of a tempestuous winter morning. Iturned my face away from the gracious young life amidst which I moved, like a man possessed of a dark secret to his undoing. My heart, yeteager for the joy of living and yearning for affection, was dailystarved of its need as by a power of deliberate and feline cruelty; andwith every expansive impulse instantly restrained by this dæmonicforce, I was left at last unresponsive as a maltreated child, who flingshis arms round no one, but shrinks back into his own world of solitaryfancies. 

I think there is no misery so great as that of youth surrounded by allopportunities for wholesome fellowship, endowed with natural facultiesfor enjoyment, yet repressed and thwarted at every turn by invincibleself-consciousness and mistrust: surely no lost opportunities of manhoodleave such aching voids as these. In the spring-time of life to feel dayby day the slow erosion of the power of joy is of all pains mostpoignant; out of it grow anxieties, premature despairs, incongruous withfresh cheeks and a mind not yet mature. This misery was mine for thosefour years which to most men are the happiest of a whole career, but tome at every retrospect seem so beset with gloomy shadows that could Ilive my life again, I would not traverse them once more for all the goldof Ophir. 

At first I writhed and strained in my bonds, and sometimes would maketimid advances to the generous young hearts around me. But the tensionalways proved too sore; I never maintained the ground I had won, andwith a perilous fatalism more and more readily accepted what I deemedinevitable failure. There were among them, I doubt it not now, Samaritans who would have tended my bruised limbs; but then they allseemed to be gliding over the black ice, too happy to stay and lift upthe fallen. And bruised though I was, I still rose time and again andmoved painfully among them, so that theirs was no culpable or mercilessneglect. 

Yet the end for me was illimitable dreariness; and like Archie in _Weirof Hermiston_, I seemed abroad in a world from which every hope ofintimacy was banished. And as with every month the hopelessness ofresistance was made plainer and plainer, there came upon me therecklessness of the condemned man who jests or blasphemes to hide hisruth. Overwrought continually by forebodings of coming pain, unstrung bystrange revulsions, I would pass from burning wrath to cold despair, amost petulant and undisciplined sufferer. Uniting in one person thephysical exuberance of youth and the melancholy of disillusionedmanhood, I was deprived of the balanced energy proper to either age, andkept up a braggart courage with the headiest wine of literature. I couldnot bear the bland homilies of the preachers, but ranged myself with theapostles of rebellion who blew imperious trumpet blasts before the wallsof ordered life. 

Verily the violence of the blasts was sometimes such that the rampartsshould have fallen down; and often in my exaltation I already saw themtotter, as I strode along reciting the dithyrambs of men who like myselfcould find scarce a responsive heart-beat in all this throbbing world. Above all I gloried in the declamations of Queen Mab, which sanctionedby high poetic authority the waste of my affections and my moodydefiance of life's most salutary law. With these upon my lips I roamed, an absurd pathetic figure, amid the haunts of the Scholar Gipsy, and thewayward upland breezes conspired with my truant moods. And while I satby my lamp late into the night, I turned the pages of pessimists andcynics, for no principles are dearer to a man than those which allow himto profess contempt for the benefits which he cannot enjoy. 

Yet by seeking amid such simples a balm for wounded pride, I did notreally deceive myself, but lived as a sophist rather than a philosopher. And all the while I was digging graves for my better instincts, until mysexton's mood, confining me within churchyard walls, gave me over almostentirely to the company of mental bats and owls. The danger of it allwas that though I was yet youthful, and should have been still pliant asa sapling, I was fostering the growth of those habits which, like ringsin the grain, are the signature of unyielding years. Naturalists saythat a bullfinch fed only on hempseed gradually loses his fair plumageand becomes black as a raven: so my soul, nourished on thoughts ofrebellion, put off its bright and diverse enthusiasms and was clothed inthe dark garment of despair. 

When the long-desired hour of release came, and I was free to turn myback upon the spires of my prison city, I had already plumbed an abyssof misery. The very thought of life in the conflict of the world wasabhorrent; and if I had been of the Roman Church I should have become aBenedictine and sought a lettered and cloistered peace. I despaired offinding anywhere upon earth the profound quietude, the absolutedetachment, when a chance occasion seemed to crown my desire, and blindto all warnings of disillusion, I suddenly set sail for what I thenthought might be a permanent sojourn in the East. 

Within two months' time the whole environment of my life was changed, and I was established on a lonely plantation set high upon a range ofhills whose slopes were clothed with primeval forests verging to atropical sea. My home, a white-walled, red-roofed bungalow with a greatcolumned verandah like a temple's peristyle, lay in the issue of anupper valley threaded by a clear stream, whence you may look far downover rolling plains to an horizon lost in the shimmering heat of noon. Immediately to the east rose the cone of a great solitary hill, alwaysoutlined against the sky with a majestic isolation that lent it analmost personal existence, and at the birth of every day bearing the orbof the rising sun upon its wooded shoulder. Round about, in scatteredvillages of thatched and mud-walled huts, dwelled brown men of ancientpagan ways, men who neither knew progress nor set any price upon time. 

There I entered upon a wholly new existence as remote from all thesocial trials which beset shyness as if it were passed in some island ofthe uttermost sea. I had escaped from a harrying pursuit; I was free;and to the bliss of this recovered liberty I abandoned myself, withoutattempting to justify my flight to conscience or forming any scheme forfuture years. Like a deer which has eluded the hounds, I yearned onlyfor rest and long oblivion of the chase; I wanted to live woodland daysuntil, all the strain and panic of the past forgotten, I might riserefreshed and see a new way clear before me. 

And this first abandonment was a time of ecstasy. The long tranquil dayswere crowned by nights of peace yet more desired. I lay beneath theverandah and watched the stars in their splendour, not the pin-points ofcold light that pierce our misty western heavens, but bright orbs ininnumerable companies hovering upon the tranced earth. Night after nightI saw the incomparable vision; month after month the moon rose slowlyover the high wall of the jungle, first a great globe imminent upon thetrees, next soaring remote through the upper heavens, waning at last toa sphere of pale unquickening light. I would lie thus for hoursmotionless, with lulled mind, until the breeze forerunning the dawn, orthe quavering wail of the jackal, recalled the startled thought to theprison bonds of self. 

With the gentle lapse of months all these impersonal influences tookdominion over me and gave me a quiet happiness never known before. Thenights brought the greater light; but the days too had their glories. Iwould climb the rugged sides of the mountain, and emerging into a colderworld sit beneath an overhanging rock and see the hot air quiveringover leagues of plain; while in the nearer distance, far down beneath myfeet, the rice-fields shone like emerald and the palm-fringed pools likeshields of silver. Or I would stretch myself at early afternoon on theclose-cropped grass on the jungle-edge, and watch the opposite sky takeon an ever-deeper blue against the setting sun behind me. Often at suchtimes I would hear a rushing in the highest branches, and turning verysilently, see the outposts of a troop of monkeys peering down throughthe gleaming foliage. Then, if I moved, neither head nor limb, otherswould come, and yet others, leaping from branch to branch and plungingdown from higher to lower levels like divers cleaving a deep green sea;until at last some slightest involuntary movement of mine would put thewhole host to flight, and greybeards, young warriors, camp followers andmothers with their children on their backs would spring precipitate fromtree to tree, screaming and gibbering like Homer's sapless dead. Then, when the stars rushed out and the darkness came on apace, it was sweetto wander home along those paths so dear to primitive men in allcountries, narrow paths and sinuous, smoothed by the footfalls ofcenturies, winding patiently round every obstacle and never breakingthrough after the brutal manner of civilization. The fire-flies gleamedin the brushwood on either hand, and from every side rose thatall-pervading hum of busy insects through which the tropic forest isnever still. 

Amid these surroundings, so peaceful and so new, my soul was stilled tothat {galênê} or ocean-calm which the old Greek philosopher found thehighest good for man. And month by month the mere material side of lifegrew of less moment; the body fretted the spirit less, but often seemeda tissue of gossamer lightness through which it could pass at will, asthe breeze through the gleaming spider-webs upon the bushes at dawn. There were times when the ideal of the mystic seemed well-nighaccomplished, when my body might almost have been abandoned by the soulfor hours upon end. The words of Emerson seemed to be fulfilled: "Bybeing assimilated to the original soul by whom and after whom all thingssubsist, the soul of man does then easily flow into all things and allthings flow into it: they mix; and he is present and sympathetic withtheir structure and law. "

As I write now amid the roar of London traffic, I well believe that tomen who have never bathed in eastern moonlight, the description willsound hyperbolical and false. But when I think of those old days, howserene they were, how apart, I let the words stand: I am not artistenough to give them a more plausible simplicity. All conditions that arecluse might crave seemed now to be fulfilled for my benefit. Thevirgin forests and great hills were a perpetual joy, but there was atranquil pleasure in the plantation which man's labour had reclaimedfrom these. That was a meet place indeed for the meditation of a quiethour, and no more grateful refuge can be conceived than such a shadygrove at the height of noon. You must not fancy an expanse of dusty landlined with prim rows of plants in the formal style of a nursery garden;but, spread over the lower slopes of the valleys, spacious woods ofclean, grey-stemmed trees, with overarching branches thinned to cast adiaphanous shade over the sea of lustrous dark leaves below. The shrubsstood waist-high in serried, commingling ranks, their dark burnishedleaves gleaming here and there in the sifted rays that found their waydown through the vaults of foliage; the groves of Daphne had no moreperfect sheen. 

I learned to feel for this gracious place a love only second to that ofthe wilder jungle; for nature thus tamed to work side by side with manloses indeed her austerer charm, but not her calm and dignity: these shebrings with her always to be a glory to the humblest associate of herlabour. Often as I pruned a tree, or stripped its stem of suckers, Ifelt the soothing, quickening influence of this partnership, and mythoughts turned to others who had known a like satisfaction and relief;to Obermann forgetting his melancholy in the toil of the vintage, plucking the ripe clusters and wheeling them away as if he had neverknown the malady of thought; or to Edward Fitzgerald out with the dawnamong his roses at Little Grange. 

Amid these high dreams and simple occupations, time seemed to glide awaylike a brimming stream, and the only events that marked the passing ofthe years were wayfarings through the country-side, sojournings instrange, slumbrous native towns, expeditions of wider range to old whiteports of Malabar still dreaming of the forgotten heroes whose storyCamoens sang. After many such journeys the genius of this oriental landseemed to travel with us, so familiar did every aspect of this simpleIndian life become. Our equipment was of set purpose the patriarchalgear of native fashion; narrow carts with great lumbering wheels werecovered by matting arched upon bent saplings, and had within a depth ofclean rice-straw on which at night mattresses were spread. Beneath eachyoke went a pair of milk-white oxen with large mild eyes and pendulousdewlaps, great beasts of a fine Homeric dignity and worthy ofNausicaa's wain. They swung along with a leisurely rolling gait; and iftheir silent feet moved too slowly, the sleepy brown-skinned driver, crouching on the pole between them, would shame them into speed byscornful words about their ancestry, more prompt than blows in theireffect on beasts of ancient and sacred lineage. 

We travelled at night or in the freshness of early morning, regardlessof the hours, unfretted by the tyrannous remembrances of appointedtimes. Milestones passed slowly, like things drifting, which ask noattention, and hardly perceived in the moment of their disappearance, serve only to enrich and replenish the mind's voluptuous repose. It wasa joy to lie drowsily back upon the straw, awaiting sleep and lookingout upon the stars through the open back of the cart, while thefire-flies darted across the feathery clusters of bamboo, and thecradling sound of wheels and footfalls called slumber up out of thedarkness. And it was equal delight to spring from the cart at firstflush of dawn, and see some far blue hill in the east lined like acloud with broadening gold, until the resistless sun rose a full orbabove it, flooding the grey plains and making the leaves of the banyansgleam with the lustre of old bronze. But though the sun was come, wewould often press on for yet three hours, through belts ofsquirrel-haunted wood, beside great sheets of water with wild-duckfloating far amidst, and borders starred with yellow nenuphars, acrossgroves of mango and plantain trees into landscapes of tiny terracedplots, where the vivid green rice-blades stood thick in the well-soakedearth, and bowed brown figures diverted to their roots the thread-likerivulet from the great brown tank above. 

Here would be a wayside shrine, a simple stuccoed portico with columnsstreaked in red, enclosing the sacred emblems with their offerings ofgolden marigold, and bearing upon each corner, carved in dark greystone, Siva's recumbent bull. Here millet fields, with hedges of bluealoe or euphorbias like seven-branched candlesticks, announced a placeof habitation; soon the village itself appeared, a long irregular lineof white-walled houses roofed with thatch or tile, and here and theregreater dwellings with carved balconies and barred verandahs, behindwhich impassive white-robed figures sat and seemed to ponder upon life. On the right, perhaps, would be a shop all open to the road, where, cross-legged upon a kind of daïs, the merchant sat among his piledwares, unenterprising and unsolicitous, serenely confident in thebalance-sheet of fate. On the left, in a shady corner, a barber would bebending over a half-shaven skull. Everywhere children of every shadefrom yellow to deep umber would be playing solemnly about the ways, turning upon the passing stranger their grave, unfathomable eyes. 

Beyond the village there would be a rest-house maintained for the use ofwayfaring white men, and here we would repose through the heat of theday, reclining with a book in rooms shaded with shutters, or with finemats drenched from hour to hour with cooling sprays of water. Then withthe sun's decline we would set out once more, meeting a file ofblue-robed women erect as caryatides as they came up from the well, each bearing upon her back-thrown head a water-jar of earthen or brazenware, staying her burden with a shapely brown arm circled with banglesof glass and silver. In the short hours before the darkness, we wouldencounter all the types of men which go to make up Indian countrylife--the red-slippered banker jogging on his pony beneath a whiteumbrella, the vendor of palm-wine urging a donkey almost lost beneaththe swollen skins, barefooted ryots with silent feet and stridenttongues, crowds of boys and children driving buffaloes and cows, allcoming homeward from their labour with the evening. 

And when these had gone by, and we rolled on through the scented air ofthe silent open country, we would come perhaps in the gathering darknessto a great river lapping and murmuring through the blackened rocks abovethe ford, and shining like a glorious path in the light of the risingmoon. Silently, high above the banks, there would flit through the stillair bands of flying foxes awakened for their nightly raid upon theplantain groves; and in the shadows of the further bank there wouldgleam a sudden light, or the echoes of a hailing voice would rise andthen die away. Steeped in the poetry of all these things we would crossand emerge upon the opposite slope to begin the pilgrimage of the nightanew. So to live tranquil days and unfretful, moving in quiet through astill land rich in old tradition--this was an experience of peace whichno dreams of imagination could surpass, a freshness of joy penetrativeas the fragrance of unplucked wayside flowers. 

Sometimes we would set out on longer journeys by land and sea, crossingthe wooded ghats and descending to some old port of historic name, Cochin or Mangalore or Calicut, white places of old memory, sleeping bythe blue waves as if no Vasco de Gama had ever come sailing up out ofthe West to disturb their enchanted slumber. The approach to thesedreamy shores was dark and tumultuous, as if nature had set aninitiation of contrasting toil before the enjoyment of that light andpeace. It followed the bed of a mountain stream, which began in a merepleat of the hills, tumbling often in white cascades, and enduring noboat upon its waters until half its course was run. But here itchallenged man to essay a fall; for where it burst its way over rockyslopes were channels jeopardous and hardly navigable, sequences offoaming rapids, races of wild water swirling round opposing boulders, and careering indignant of restraint between long walls of beetlingrock. Here when the sun had gone down we would embark with a crew oflithe brown men in a boat hewn from a single tree, seamless and stoutlyfashioned to be the unharmed plaything of such rocks and boisterouswaters as these. In these rapids the river waked to consciousness ofmighty life, tossing our little craft through a riot of dancing waves, whirling it round the base of perpendicular rocks set like adamant inthe hissing waters, sweeping it helpless as a petal down some glassyplane stilled, as it were, into a concentrated wrath of movement. Themen sprang from side to side, from bow to stern, staving the craft witha miraculous deftness from a projecting boulder, forcing her into a newcourse, steadying her as she reeled in the shock and strain of theconflict, while their long poles bent continually like willow wandsagainst her battered sides. The steersman stood silent, except when heshouted above all the din some resonant, eruptive word of command; themen responded by breathless invocations to their gods, relaxing no tensesinew until the pent waters rushed out into some broad pool where theeased stream went brimming silently, gathering new strength in thedarkness of its central deeps. 

At such places the moon would perhaps be obscured by passing clouds, andwe would land upon an eyot until she shone once more in a clear heaven. Stretched at length upon the fine white sand waiting for her return, wecould hear the boom of waters in the distance calling us on to a renewalof the conflict. These periods of great stillness, interposed betweentumults past and impending, had their own refinement of pleasure as farabove the joys of fenced and covenanted ease as the bivouac of the hardcampaign surpasses slumber in the fine linen of a captured city: theybrought the wandering mind into communion with elemental forces, andseemed to hold it expectant of supernatural events. In that interlunartwilight there reigned a solemn sense of wonder evoked here eternally, one felt, from the ancient time, with the rustling of stirred foliageand the voice of those far waters for its music. 

The lulled reason yielded place to reverie, and the whole rapt beingabandoned itself like an Orphic worshipper to the guidance of an unseenmysteriarch. This acquiescence in the swift succession of calm to furyand stress, resembled the quiet which may be conceived to follow suddendeath; the heightened sense of vicissitude in things summoned up andsustained a solemn mood. All the while that we lay charmed and halfoppressed in this atmosphere as of an under-world, the clouds weredrawing forward on their course; and as their last fringe trailed slowlyby and the moon was revealed once more, the spell was broken in aninstant by human voices calling us to re-embark. Again we glided to theverge of tumultuous falls, again we were flung through foaming narrowsand labyrinthine passages of torn rocks, until, the last promontoryturned with arrowy swiftness, we shot through a postern of the granitebarrier and bounded far into still water fringed with trees ofprofoundest shadow. We put in to shore, for this stage of our journeywas over; the dawn was near; the carts stood waiting on the road. Butthe influence of the wonderful night, clinging about us, would keep uslong silent, as if awed by the passing of ancient Vedic gods. 

I will not describe the later stages of these journeys: the coastingvoyages in restful ships that seemed built to sail Mæander; thetouchings at old wharfless ports; the visits to lone temples whereHerodotus would have loved to linger; the rambles on the slopes ofAdam's Peak; the meditations amid the ruins of Anaradhapura andPollanarrua, ancient homes of kings, now stripped of every glory butthat of these sonorous names--such are the records of every traveller, and are chronicled to satiety by a hundred hasty pens. A month ofwandering within the fringe of civilization would be closed by a lastweek of patriarchal travel, bringing us back to our remote valley justas the clouds of the coming monsoon were ranging in denser ranks alongthe evening sky like the tents of a beleaguering army. Hardly had wetime to settle down for the wet season, see to the stacking offire-logs, and be sure that every tile on the roof was firm in itsappointed place, when the embattled host seemed to break up from itslast camp, and advance upon us along the whole line that the eyeperceived. 

One year I was witness of the first onset, which came in the lateafternoon--an immediate shock of massed clouds without throwing forwardof skirmishers or any prelude of the vanguard. Our home looked down upona gentle incline of open grassy land to a broad belt of jungle in themiddle distance; here the undergrowth and small trees had been newlycleared away, opening out a dim far view across an uncumberedleaf-strewn floor into the backward gloom of the forest. I sat with myeyes fixed upon the trees, drawing the rain on with the whole strengthof desire to the parched country lying there faint with the exhaustionof three months of drought. While I watched, the deep line of cloud, atfirst distinct from the forest-top along which it came rolling, insensibly merged with the foliage, until every contour was lost in acommon gloom, only the great bare stems below standing pale against thegathering darkness. There was an intense stillness everywhere like thesilence of expectation which falls upon an awestruck crowd; the veryinsects had ceased their usual song. And now the ear caught a distantsound, vague and deep, coming up out of the mid darkness, and growing toa mighty volume as a sudden wind swept out from the sounding foliageinto the open land and searched every cranny of the house as it passed. Then, as if drawn by the wind, there came into view among the nearesttree-stems a moving grey line advancing with a long roar until it hidthe whole forest from sight: it was the wave of battle about to breakupon us. It came on like a wall, enormous, irresistible; one instant, and it had devoured the intervening space; another, and we were lost inthe deluge, and the great rain drops were spilled upon the roof with thenoise of continuous thunder. As the deep sound reverberated through theroof above me, I went in exulting to a hearth piled with blazing logs, glad in the prospect of renewing for many weeks old and quiet habitudesof indoor life, rich with solace of books and tranquil meditation. 

 * * * * *

I have dwelt upon the outward aspects of my life in exile, because thesojourn of these years amid the hills and forests taught a naturalleechcraft which was to stand me in good stead in coming years, and maystand in equal stead other souls desolate as mine. Like the Nilebrimming over the fields, a flood of joy from nature overlaid my parchedbeing, enriching it with a fertile loam, and shielding it from theirritations of the world. I lay fallow beneath the still, sunlit waters, unharrowed by teasing points of doubt, and porous to the influence of anall-encompassing peace. Exile had opened to me a new heaven and a newearth, whose freshness and calm charmed thought away from all vainquestionings; the fascination of outward things had for a while cooledthe useless ardour of introspection. But it was inevitable that thebland ease of such a contemplative life should bring no enduringsatisfaction to the mind; it was not an end in itself, but a mere meansto serenity, a breathing-space useful to the recovery of a long-lostfortitude. The time was now come when the hunted deer, refreshed in thequiet of his inaccessible glen, was to awake to new thought of the herd, and of the duties of a common life; when the peace of successful flightwas to appear in its true light as a momentary release, and no longer asthe ultimate goal imagined in the anguish of pursuit. 

It was during this last monsoon that doubts began to stir within, interrupting my studies of the systems of Hindu philosophy and myporings over sacred books. The vague insistence of these misgivings mademe surely aware that even in this eastern paradise all was not well;but at first I refused to listen, and plunged deep into the maze of theVedanta to escape the importunate voice. Yet anxiety came up around melike a heavy atmosphere; an indescribable sense of disillusion, clingingas a damp mist, brought its mildew to the soul, until my new heaven wasovercast and my new earth dispeopled of all pleasures. Then one day thefever struck me down, and of a sudden my mind became an arena in whichmemories of earlier life chased one another unceasingly in the round ofa delirious dance. Trivial events impressed themselves on consciousnesswith strange precision; objects long forgotten rose before me outlinedin fire--one, a pane of stained glass in Fairford Church, with a lostsoul peering in anguish through the red bars of hell. Each and everyapparition was of the old life; all were emissaries from the forsakenWest summoning me back to my renounced allegiance. When the fever leftme, returning reason slowly brought order amid the welter of confusedideas, as the ants sorted the grain for distracted Psyche, and for thefirst time I considered in the detachment of reminiscence the nature ofmy action in leaving England. I sifted the evidence at length as I layunder the verandah slowly recovering strength; and when at last judgmentwas delivered, it took the necessary form of condemnation. 

I saw now that unless a man is prepared to discard every western usage, to slough off his inherited cast of thought, to renounce his faith, wholly and finally to abandon his country and his father's house, hisflight is but the blind expedient of cowardice or pride. Here and theremay be born one who can so cut himself off from the parent stem as toendure a fruitful grafting upon an oriental stock, but I knew that I atleast was none such. I was no more prepared for so uncompromising arenunciation than any other weakling who seeks prestige by parade ofexotic wisdom, and deems himself a seer if he can but name the Triad, ortell the avatars of Vishnu, I had not the credulity which may justifythe honest renegade, and the western blood still ran too warmly in myveins. I felt that were I to stay in the East for fifty years, I shouldnever reach the supreme heights of metaphysical abstraction whence menreally appear as specks and life as a play; therefore to remain was toavow myself a runaway and to live henceforth despicable in my own eyes. For over the unfathomable deep of oriental custom the torrent of ourcivilization flows unblending, as in the Druid's legend the twin streamsof Dee flow clear through Bala lake, and never mingle with its waters. Not for our use is that intricate mind which in logic needs more thantwo premises to a conclusion, and in art is intolerant of all voidspace, entangling its figures in labyrinths of ornament which Mayaherself might have devised to distract the sight from truth. 

The Hindu has the true dignity of contemplation, and superbly removeshimself from the sordid greeds of life. But in imagining and reviling anabstraction called Matter, he abides in the errors of the first Greeksages, and mines so far beneath the trodden earth that when he looks upinto middle day he sees only the stars above him. Could I have sharedthe eremite's belief that his prayers help not merely his own solitarysoul but all souls travailing through all the world, I might yet haveremained where I was, an alien living indifferent to the common rule, like a monk of some shunned exotic order. But with convictions likemine, to do so would have brought the drear sense of derogation. All themiseries of the past were as nothing to that; there was but one manlycourse--to return and gird my loins for a new struggle with westernlife. Within a month from the time when this course was seen to be aduty, I was standing on the deck of a homeward-bound steamer, watchingthe harbour lights recede into the distance. 

 * * * * *

Back once more in England, I threw aside the clinging robe ofmeditation, and falling upon work ravenously, indulged what genius ofenergy was still alive within me. I made haste to adore all that I hadso lately burned, making life objective, revering personal ideals, andin the ordinance of material things finding the truest satisfaction ofall endeavour. I saw in civilization the world's sole hope; its brisklife and abounding force took sudden hold of a fancy enervated bydreams. Again I found a new heaven and a new earth, though earth was nowno more than man's dinted anvil, and heaven his reservoir of usefullight. I lived for action and movement; I mingled eagerly with myfellows, and cursed the folly which had driven me to waste three yearsin an intellectual swoon. Now the day was not long enough for work, Lebanon was not sufficient to burn. I saw the western man with race-duston his cheeks, or throned in the power-houses of the world, moving uponiron platforms and straight ladders in the mid throb and tumult ofencompassing engines. One false step, and he must fall a crushed andmutilated thing. Yet unconcerned as one strolling at large, hecontrolled the great wheels and plunging pistons, and brought them to astandstill with a touch of his finger. The confidence and strenuous easeof such life compelled me to marvel and admire, and I who had so latelylain at the feet of eastern sages, set up this mechanician as my god. If I looked back at all to the land of dreams, the placid figure beneaththe Tree of Enlightenment took on the aspect of a fool's idol, ignoblyself-manacled, pitiful and irksome in remembrance. 

But if once more I dreamed of finality in change I deceived myself, forgetting that God Himself cannot unmake the past or undo what is done. A year had hardly gone by in this new apprenticeship to life, when atmoments of weariness or overstrain sharp doubts shot through me and weregone again, like twinges of sudden pain recalling old disease to one whohas lulled himself with dreams of cure. The feeling of fellowship withmen grew weaker, and as it waned I began to shrink once more from mykind. I still believed myself happy, but happiness seemed to needconstant affirmation, as though it could make no way in my favourwithout display of token or credential to confirm its truth. There werepauses in the clatter and jangle of life; the revolutions of the greatwheels sometimes slowed into silence; and as these interludes grew morefrequent, I caught myself repeating that I really was content. The faintassurance given, I flung myself with devouring industry upon my allottedtask, trying to stifle the forebodings which prophesied against mypeace. 

In one such pause my old self appeared before me again, like the face ofan ancient enemy looking in from the darkness; stealthy footfalls whichof late I had so often seemed to hear were now referred to their truecause as we saw each other eye to eye. The old Adam had awakened and wascome for his inheritance; and the vision of him there across the panegazing in upon his own, seemed to arraign me for disowning a brother anddenying his indefeasible right. I recognized that with this familiarform cold reason had returned to oust the hopes and emotions which hadusurped her office. My rush for freedom had ended, as such sallies oftendo, in exhaustion, capture and despair; upon the thrill and thunder ofthe charge followed the silence of the dungeon and the anguish ofstiffening wounds. The truth, so simply written that a child might havespelled it, lay clear before me: I had left reformation till too late. Iwas too old to change. 

Even a few years before, I might have dashed out, like Marmion, from theprison-fortress; but now the opportunity was past and the portcullis wasdown. My character with all its faults was formed within me; and thevery years which I had passed in the wilderness, instead of averting thedanger, had set the final seal upon my fate, for when a man has reacheda certain point in life he is intractable to the reforming hand. Butthough at last I knew myself beaten, and helpless in the hands of animplacable power, I fluttered like a wounded bird and sought wildly fora loophole of escape. I could no longer hope to stand alone againstdestiny; that conceit was gone: could I find a comrade to help methrough the press and lift me when I fell? But here the invincible prideof shyness barred the way, forbidding alike any confession of weaknessor any appeal to man's compassion. I could not bring myself to say: I amunable to rule my life, do you undertake it for me. Was marriage aconceivable path of redemption? I had never envisaged it before, butnow, in my desperation, I dreamed it for a moment a possible issue. Ieven fixed upon the person who should thus save me from myself, andbeguiled many lonely hours by picturing her charms and enumerating hernoble qualities. 

She lived in a country house where I had been several times a guest, andshe had one of those faces which, in Gray's beautiful expression, speakthe language of all nations. Her features had that sunny charm whichthaws mistrust; she was dowered with all graces and sweet qualities; andyou could no more have doubted the immanent nobility of her nature thanyou could have dreamed a stain in the texture of a white petal. And withall her gentleness there was present I know not what sign and promise ofstrength, waking in those who saw her an intuitive trust in loyalty ofuttermost proof. She would have flamed indignant against evil, but onlyevil could have moved her from that equal poise of soul which made herentrance into a room the prelude to higher thoughts and finer feelings. She was naturally kind without consciousness of a mission, neitherseeking to enslave nor enfranchise, but by a silent outflowing ofgoodness ennobling whatever company she was in. Nor was her tongue theprattling servant of her beauty, but a guide of cheerful converse; forjust as she charmed without device or scheme of fascination, so shepossessed the art of speaking well without seeming to have ever studiedit. In the chase after just and felicitous ideas, she could lead orfollow over the most varied fields with the intuition of the huntressborn. With all these excellences, her wit, her sincerity, her ardour forall things bright and true, she had no conceit of herself but kept herfather's house in gladness and loved the country-side. 

To her, in these days of imminent dismay, my thoughts flew out as to afair protecting saint; until the inspiration of her visionary presencewrought in my fancy with such a dramaturgic power, that I seemed to walkdaily with her, and to know all those delicate and sweet propinquitiesby which liking passes into affection and affection is glorified intolove. So far did these happy day-dreams carry me, that they brought meto the extreme of imaginary bliss, and poured out for me the wine ofuntempered joy which thrills the hearts of lovers on the verge of theirbetrothal. The dreams that followed that magic draught denied me noconvincing touch of circumstance, and projected upon a credible andfamiliar scene the bright possibilities to which fate denied a realexistence. The scene was always the same, and the words and movementswhich entranced me followed each other with almost religious exactitudeof detail which the adult demands of his day-dreams and the child of thefairy-tale he loves. 

It was always a June afternoon when we went out together, into themeadows near her home; she moving with fluent grace as befitted adaughter of the woods, her eyes indrawing joy from all nature, her hairreflecting rich gold of the sunlight, her whole face lit with thepleasure of a bright hour; I a mere satellite attendant upon itscentral star. We strolled through the four home-meadows, crossed ahigh-banked lane and a dingle with a brook running down it, and thenfrom an open common flooded with sunlight passed into a wood of tallestbeeches. In that cool, shadowy place the sun, searching a way throughcrannies in the upper verdure, chequered with patches of silver lightthe even mast-strewn floor. The multitude of smooth grey stems rosealigned like cathedral columns; and the grateful dimness of the wood, succeeding the glare of day, wakened a sense of purposed protection andquietude pervading all things, which soothed the mind with the illusionthat this was a sacred spot appointed for an offering of souls. Near oneof those isles of sunlight we lingered; and as she looked up to thesource of light, the movement brought her face near the slanting shaftof rays, until there was set round it an aureole of dancing beams. Itseemed to me at this part of my dream that there came to both of us somegracious influence, for as her eyes met mine they dropped again, andwere fixed for a moment upon the wild flowers she carried. Then my heartbegan to beat and my whole being to grow greater: impassioned words, tothat hour unconceived, came rushing to my lips; the fire and glory of anew manhood were kindling in me to the transformation of mynature--when, in the very moment of utterance, a sheer barrier of doomdescended between me and my joy; the fire was quenched, and my soul waspoured out within me. 

To this fatal point my fancy always brought me and no further, thatcoming thus to the threshold of the house of joy and hearing the barsshoot into their sockets I might thoroughly know my ineffectual self andleave untouched the forbidden latch. So far I came in my dream timeswithout number; and always on the verge of joy there came that doom, andthe shooting of those adamantine bolts. 

Yet all the while I wove it, I knew that this texture of dreams mustsoon be drawn aside, and like the curtain in the tragedy reveal at lastthe horror concealed within. Such brooding was but the deception of areluctant spirit dallying and delaying with any trifle by the way to putoff the arrival at the hill of evil prospect. At last I learned thelesson of this abrupt ending to the dream at the point of fulldisillusion; it forced itself upon me with the power of an oracularutterance warning me to cease my palterings with fate. My reason nowrebuked me like a stern judge, dissecting all false pleas and layingbare their weakness. What right had I, now knowing myself incurable, even to dream of easing my own pain by darkening and despoiling a secondlife? The love of solitude was now more to me than even the love of awife; it would surely come between us like a strange woman, and fill apure heart with bitterness. No smiling hopes of a possible redemptioncould annul the immutable decree, and if I disobeyed the warning, guiltas well as misery would be mine; for he is pitiful indeed who only wedsthat his wife may suck the poison from his wounds. If I married I shouldstand for ever condemned of an unutterable meanness. So I dispelled mydreams and looked reality in the face. 

It was a dismal prospect that lay before me. Until then the future hadheld its possible secrets, its imaginable revelations of change, which, like the luminous suggestions in dark clouds, allured with a promise ofa brief and penetrable gloom. In my darkest hours I had lulled fear bythe thought of a haply interposing Providence, and drifted on from dayto aimless day nursing the hope of some miraculous release upon the verysteps of the scaffold. But now I was twice fallen; and as a manabandoned by the last illusion of deliverance calls ruin to him, and inthe new leisure of despair calmly scans the features at which but now hedared not glance, so I saw as in a hard grey light the true outlines ofmy destiny. The wreathing mist, the profound soft shadows, the cloudswith their promise of mutability, were now all gone, leaving the bareframework of a world arid and severe as a lunar landscape. 

I seemed to be sitting in the dust, as in inmost Asia a sick man maycrouch abandoned, while the caravan in which all his earthly hopes arecentred goes inexorably upon its way. The blue sky flushes to deeppurple before him; night falls; all colour is swallowed up in darkness, until the jingling camel-bells receding up the pass cross the dividingridge, and for him the last silence is begun. Such then was the end ofyouthful ambition: for food a mouthful of ashes instead of the verymarrow of joy; for home not the free ocean, but a stagnant pool ringedwith weeping willows, a log's fit floating-place. Here to float, markingthe weed creep onward until all from bank to bank was overfilmed, andthere remained no clear water of space for reflection of a single star:to float, and feel the sodden fibres of life loosening in slowdecay--this was to be the last state of the seedling which had sprung upon the mountain slopes with promise of mighty stem and overarchingbranches full of sap like the cedars of the Lord. 

My life henceforth was to be ringed round and overhung with so heavy anair that joy and fancy should never fly in it, but fall dead as thebirds above Avernus according to the ancient story. I seemed to seenothing upon the path of the future but the stern form of Renunciationdrawing between me and the living world the impassable circle of deathin life, the _ultima linea rerum_. It was the last decree, theirrevocable sentence, the absolute end: and I had not yet reached halfthe Psalmist's span; I had not yet forgotten the lost summer morningswhen the breeze scented with lilac came blowing through the casement, bearing with it the sound of glad voices welcoming the day. 

Philosophers are prone to gird at the animal in man, accusing it ofdragging the soul down to the mire in which it wallows. They forget thatby its brutal insistence upon physical needs it often preserves frommadness, and timely arrests him who goes like a sleep-walker upon theverge of the abyss. Weariness and hunger are like brakes upon the car;they stop the dire momentum of grief, and insure that if misery willagain drive us furiously, she must lash winded steeds anew. But whatforce should stay a disembodied sorrow, which unbreathed by period oralternation of despair, should be rapt onward in the whirlwind and thehurricane, gathering eternally a fresh impetus of woe? Let us rail atthe body for its weakness if we will, but prize it also for itsrestraint of the distracted mind. In the worst hour of my dejection itwas the body which called the lost reason home. I became hungry and ate, hardly knowing what I did; I slept exhaustion away; and after many hoursawoke with clearer eyes, grateful to the weak flesh, and ready in itscompany to face life once more, a defeated but not a desperate man. Iwas glad to be thus reminded that the body could play this helpful part, and my gratitude for its timely rescue taught me in after days to endureits tyranny with a better grace. In the interlude between despair andnew effort, I once more turned a dispassionate gaze upon myself, as uponsome abandoned slave of a drug; and maintaining an attitude ofhalf-amused detachment, sought by a diagnosis of my case to establishthe real causes of my failure to lead a normal life. 

At the outset I would make it clear that for me the only shyness thatcounts, is that which is so deeply ingrained, as to have outlastedyouth. It may, indeed, be physically related to that transientbashfulness which haunts so many of us in our younger days only tovanish at maturity, swift as the belated ghost at cockcrow. But unlikethis common accident of growth, it is no surface-defect, but an inwardstain which dyes the very fibres of the being. It may, indeed, besomewhat bleached and diminished by a timely and skilful treatment, butis become too much a part of life to be ever wholly washed away. And theunhappy step-children of nature whose inheritance it is, seldom find adeliverer good at need; for as the world draws no distinction betweentheir grave affliction and that other remediable misery of youth, itwill sanction no other treatment than banter or mockery, which does butinfuse yet more deeply the mournful dye. When this fails, it leaves itsvictims to the desolation which according to its judgment they havewilfully chosen; for the most part ignoring their existence, but oftenchastising them with scorpion-stings of disdain. Yet the subjects ofthis scorn, sufferers as I believe from a hereditary tendency matured byneglect into disease, deserve a more merciful usage than this, and theirplea for extenuating circumstances should not be too impatientlyrejected. For in them what is to most men a transient ailment has throwndown permanent roots to draw a nourishment from pain: and he who isfortunate enough to be whole should think twice before he makes sport ofthose in this distress. 

To me this malady seems to arise from an antinomy between the physicaland intellectual elements of the personality, from an unhappy marriageof mind and body, suffering the lower of the two partners to abase thelife of the higher by the long-drawn misery of a hateful butindissoluble union. When the physical and mental natures in a man arehappily attuned, there is a fair concord in his life and the outwardexpression of his being is an unimpeded process, to which, as to thefunctions of a healthy organism, no heedful thought is given. If bothnatures are of the finest temper, they find utterance in a nobleamiability and ease of manner; if both are coarse in the grain, theyblend in a naïve freedom always sure of itself, the freedom of Sanchospreading himself in the duchess's boudoir. Between these two extremesthere intervene a hundred compromises by which minds and bodies lessequally yoked contrive to muffle the discordant notes of an inharmoniouswedlock. 

In most cases use gives to this politic agreement the peace andpermanence of settled habit; the body proves itself so far amenable thatit is accepted as a needful if uninspiring companion, and its plainusefulness ends by dulling the edged criticisms of the mind. Butwherever there is a permanent incompatibility too profound forcompromise, an elemental difference keeping the personality continuallydistraught, then shyness, in the sense in which I understand it, assumesits inalienable dominion. The flame of rebellion may smoulder unobservedwhile the sufferer is in his own home, but among strangers it willblaze fiercely, as the mind protests against the misinterpretations ofits unworthy partner. This burning shame is not the proof of a foolishconceit, as unsympathetic criticism proclaims it, but the visible miseryof a keen spirit thwarted by physical defect. The man who manifests itis angered with himself because through a physical hindrance he hasfailed to take the place which would otherwise be his. He is proud, itmay be, but not fatuous; for shyness as a rule implies a comparativequickness and alertness of intellect: its exceeding sensibility isexclusive of dulness; and it is frequently due to the presence in areluctant body of a mind endowed with active powers. 

Inasmuch as diffidence appears where the subtler formalities of life arecompulsory, it is clear that it essentially belongs to the class calledgentle, for this class alone enforces that exacting code of etiquette towhich our discomfiture is so largely due. Shyness has seldom place inthe patriarchal life where men live, "sound, without care, every manunder his own vine or his own fig-tree, " nor among those who, perforcepursuing a too laborious existence, have no leisure for superficialrefinements. Though here and there you may find a Joseph Poorgrass, itis rare among the simple; it is not a popular weakness, and thereforewins no popular sympathy. Such is its first social limitation: it isalmost restricted to the classes which are outwardly refined. 

But it has another limitation of equal importance which may be describedas climatic; for this malady is not found in equal degrees all over thehabitable globe. There are many lands where it hardly exists at all evenamong the class which is alone liable to it; and in its serious form itis found only over a small part of the earth. There are many causeswhich conduce to this partial distribution. In one country manners arenot minutely schooled, women being held of secondary account, and mencontent without subtlety; in another, life is in itself too primitive todevise the artifices of refinement; in a third, the fundamental disunionbetween the mind and the physical organism is prevented by the kindlyhand of nature. For these reasons all the savage world, all the East, and the whole of southern Europe have little knowledge of the diffident, and what zoologists would call the area of distribution of the speciesis confined within narrow geographical limits. 

It is in fact chiefly in the north and west of our own continent thatthe haunts of the diffident are to be found, for there alone are all theconditions necessary to their maintenance fulfilled--a societysufficiently leisured and wealthy to have elaborated conventional rulesof intercourse, the assemblage of both sexes upon an equal footing, anda climate which exaggerates the antagonism between the quick mind andthe unresponsive body. Here the cold humid airs have produced a racewith great limbs and great appetites, but compensated these gifts by acertain unreadiness in the delicate encounter of wits and graces. Tothese impassive natures all displays of the personality are distasteful, and the lighter social arts, seeming both insignificant and histrionic, are learned with difficulty and practised with repugnance. Anawkwardness of address, in the uneducated almost bovine, becomes in thecultivated a painful reserve and self-consciousness, reflecting in openphysical distress the uneasiness of the man's whole being. 

And among the northern nations which are thus afflicted England hasachieved an undesirable supremacy, having herself smoothed the path ofher eminence by a school system which withdraws her youth from femaleinfluences during the years when the tendency to reserve may be combatedwith a certain hope of success. It would ill become one who has neverrecovered from the effects of such deprivation to assume on the groundof his own narrow experience any wide dissemination of similar defectsamong his countrymen; his testimony would be received with suspicion, and he would be condemned as one who to justify himself would dragothers down to his own poor level. Let me therefore place myself onsurer ground by calling as a witness an impartial observer from anothercountry, one exceptionally trained in the analysis of nationaltemperament and conduct. 

When M. Taine visited England towards the close of the nineteenthcentury one of the first things to attract his notice was thebashfulness which he encountered in unexpected places. He was surprisedto meet travelled and cultured men who were habitually embarrassed insociety, and so reserved that you might live with them six months beforeyou discovered half their excellent qualities. To unveil their truenature there was needed the steady breeze of a serious interest or thehurricane of perilous times; the faint airs of courtliness could notstir the heavy folds that hung before their hearts. These strong mencould not join in delicate raillery, but shrank back afraid; as if atortoise, startled by a shower of blossoms, should withdraw into thatthick carapace which can bear the impact of a rock. There was one whostammered pitifully in a drawing-room, but the next day sought thesuffrages of electors with an unembarrassed and fluent eloquence, soproving that his failure came not of folly or cowardice, but from lackof training in a certain school of fence. He needed the open air for theplay of his broadsword; and to his hand, apt to another hilt, the foilappeared a woman's weapon. Speaking of high aims and national ideals, hemoved in a large place oblivious of himself; but in the social arena hetripped with timid steps, like a man essaying an unfamiliar dance. Onthe platform he had the enthusiasm and confidence of an orator; on thecarpet he could not string three sentences in any courtly language. 

In the North the art of mercurial dialogue, which in the South is anatural gift, is only learned under favourable conditions, and is oftencondemned by those who have it not, as a popinjay's accomplishment. Immediate cordiality to strangers is frowned upon as tending to divorcecourtesy from truth. It is otherwise with the southern peoples. Whilethe Englishman conceals his benevolence by a frigid aloofness of manner, or blurts out friendliness like an indiscretion, the Italian is courtlywithout a second thought, and the Frenchman seems the comrade of achance acquaintance from the moment when he has taken his hand. They areamiable without effort in the security of a harmonious nature, and ifthey encounter diffidence at all, observe it like an anthropologistconfronted with a survival of primitive times in the culture of acivilized age. 

Taine did not err when he found the home of shyness among the Teutonicpeoples; he saw that it flourishes in climatic conditions acting hardlyupon a vigorous race, and only allowing it to cultivate ease of mannerby effort and outlay, just as they only allow it to raise under glassthe grapes and oranges which more favoured peoples can grow in the openair. He saw too that this pain of diffidence becomes more subtle as theprogress of culture makes us more sensitive to vague impressions fromour environment, and tunes the nerves to a higher pitch. A shy natureupon this plane of susceptibility suffers anguish from an uncontrollablebody; and even in peaceful moments the memory of the discomfitures soinflicted may distort a man's whole view of the world around him. He isimpatient of the wit which demands a versatility in response beyond hispowers, and persuades himself into contempt of those ephemeral arts towhich his nature cannot be constrained. Irritated at the injustice whichplaces so high in the general scale of values accomplishments which hecannot practise, shrinking from the suave devices of gesture andexpression which in his own case might quickly pass into antic orgrimace, he withdraws more and more from the places where such arts winesteem to live in a private world of inner sentiment. As he leaves thissure retreat but rarely himself, so he forbids ingress to others; andbecoming yearly a greater recluse, he confines himself more and morewithin the walls of his forbidden city. The mind which may have beenfitted to expand in the free play of intellectual debate or to explorethe high peaks of idea, loses its power of flight in this cave where itdwells with a company of sad thoughts, until at last the sacrifice iscomplete and the perfect eremite is formed. 

But the virile Teutonic spirit does not suffer things to reach thisultimate pass without stubborn resistance, and this is one reason whyshyness is often so conspicuous, seeming deliberately to court anavoidable confusion. Over and over again it forces the recalcitrant bodyback into the arena, preferring repeated humiliation to a pusillanimoussurrender. People often wonder at the recklessness with which the shyexpose themselves to disaster, forgetting that in this insistence of asoul under discomfiture, there is evidence of a moral strength which isits own reward. What discipline is harder than that which conscientiousdiffidence imposes upon itself? To stand forth and endure, though everyinstinct implores retreat, is a true assertion of the higher self forthe satisfaction of imperious duty. Such deliberate return towardssuffering is no cowardice, but a triumph over weak flesh; and theawkward strife of diffidence may often prove a greater feat of arms thanthe supple fence of self-possession. 

Like the physical obstacles, the mists, the snows and bleak winds, whichhave hardened the fibre of northern men, diffidence as an obstacle toease has its place among the causes of strong character; and those whoappear at a first glance weak and ineffectual as Hamlet, will often inthe light of knowledge be found guided by the most inflexible moraldetermination. They see, as in a mirage, peace supreme and adorable, butmay not tread the hermit's path that leads to her dwelling. Only areligious vow might justify the abandonment of the human struggle, andeven that appears desertion. The stern genius of the North grudgesimmurement, even to great piety, remembering that Christ himselfremained but forty days in the desert and then returned to deliver theworld. If he had remained there all his life, and never met thePharisees and high-priests, our forefathers would have rejected his law. For this reason there can be no more rest for the shy than for starvingTantalus; for this reason my flight into the East had been foredoomed tofailure. 

If shyness is thus affected by climate and geography, its birth andgrowth are also conditioned by historical causes. Just as it is thepeculiar failing of northern and western peoples, so it is the creationof comparatively modern times; it had no place among the classifiedweaknesses of men until these peoples began in their turn to makehistory. 

In Greece, where limb and thought were consentient in one grace ofmotion, the body was too perfect an expression of the mind to admit anyconsciousness of discord; the greater simplicity of a life passedlargely in the open air, left no place for awkwardness in the frankerconverse of man with man. Moreover the seclusion of women renderedunnecessary that complicated code of manners which the freer intercourseof the sexes has built up in later times as a barrier against brutalityor the unseemly selfishness of passion. In Greece the words of the wittyand the wise could be heard in the market-place; good conversation wasnot for the few alone; and the common man might of unquestioned rightapproach the circle of Socrates or Plato. The sense of community waseverywhere, overthrowing reserve, and propitious to the universal growthof fellowship. 

In the Roman world things were changed; there were more closed doors andcourts impenetrable of access. Insignia of office, gradations of wealthand rank, sundered those of high estate from classes which nowacknowledged their own inferiority; privacies, exclusions, distinctionsinnumerable, altered the face of public life as the easy _mos majorum_was confined by the ordinances of encroaching fashion. It was now thatwomen began to be cast for leading parts upon the great stage of life. Under the Empire, by the rapid removal of her disabilities the Romanmatron achieved a position of independence which made her, according toher nature, a potent force of good or evil. It was now that theintricate threads of social prescription were woven into that ceremonialmantle which was afterwards to sit so uneasily on the shoulders ofbarbarian men. 

But the time for shyness was not yet come, for Italy is a sunny landwhere clear air makes clear minds, blandly or keenly observant of theworld, and never impelled by onset of outer mists and darkness to tend aflickering light within themselves. There was melancholy, high andstately, such as Lucretius knew, when he went lonely among thehomesteads or along the shore; but it was too exalted to be one withdiffidence, for he who will hold the sum of things in his thoughts walkson clouds above the heads of men, free of all misgiving. Perhaps beyondthe Alps, in some Rhætian upland where Roman dignity was interfused withold barbaric roughness, the first signs of our malady were perceived andthe first ancestor of all the shy was born. But even yet the time wasnot ripe, nor the place prepared. Christianity had to come, turningmen's eyes inwards and proclaiming the error of the objective pagan way. A new feeling, the sense of personal unworthiness before God, spreadingthrough the Roman world, now stirred mankind to still communing withthemselves, and sanctioned the stealing away from the noisy festivals oflife. By enjoining a search into the depths of the heart, it encouragedthe growth of a self-consciousness hitherto unknown. It was not always apanic of contrition, sweeping the joyous out of the sunlight into amonastic shade, which brought the troubled into a new way of peace, butsometimes a quiet joy in renunciation, congruous with a timid mood, leading by gradual allurement to cloisters of shadowy lanes and cellswhich were forest bowers. The new faith gave open sanction to evasion ofthe banquet, and thus fortified and increased those who loved not theceremonial day. The spirit of solitude, no more a mænad, but a nun, sheltered earth's children in the folds of her robe, and no man said hernay. 

Moreover, Christianity quickened the force of that feminine influencewhich Rome had first set flowing through the civilized world, butdiverted the stream from irregular and torrential courses into a smoothchannel gliding amid sacred groves. It clothed woman with ideal graceand virtue, and perceived in her powers which the virile mind couldnever wield. "Inesse quinetiam sanctum aliquid et providum putant, necaut consilia earum aspernantur, nec responsa negligunt. " So ourancestors held in the northern woods, and Christianity, purifying andexpanding their belief, fulfilled it with a new perfection. 

But this gradual binding of all men's limbs in silken cords ofreverence, making a rude world civil, was now to inaugurate fordiffidence its miserable career. Through the rough deference of theGerman camp, through the Provençal code of _courtoisie_, up to themodern law of fine manners, the drudge and chattel of the primeval tribehas risen to impose her law upon the modern world. Earth is better forthis finer power, but social intercourse is less sincere. For woman, having curbed the brute man by conventional restraints of outwarddemeanour, has made human intercourse smooth and seemly, but imposedupon mankind the wearing of unnatural masks. Before the multitude oflocked souls with labels of smiling faces the sensitive nature feelsitself mocked, and is soon distraught. It cannot suffer conventiongladly for an ultimate good, but is chilled by this everlastingurbanity, which must, it fancies, be compact of irony and conceal adisingenuous soul. 

All this finished science of illusion is like an east wind to theconfidences of the shy, and if they stay within its range they areblighted before their hearts have time to unfold. They long for a lessbiting air, for vernal hours in sheltered dells, where without sheathsand unguarded the hearts of flowers lie open to their neighbours and toheaven. There was once a simple day when religion set heartsinterflowing, but now it can melt them only within the precincts; thefire which is carried from the altar is dead at the church door. Thebrotherliness of those early days is indeed often found in humble walksof life, but these we cannot continually tread, because our intellectualand artistic tastes find there no sufficient nurture. Among the cultureda cold convention often reigns, behind which only a more persistentnature than ours can pass. Unless, therefore, we find our way into somecircle of gentle scholars or lovers of the beautiful quite simple intheir tastes, a thing possible but not often granted by a niggardfortune, we are perforce thrown back upon our own company, and movetowards the grave alone. For this we accuse none; nothing is more atfault than our own constitution. But to us society is a school of dames, who are not to be blamed if amid the crowd that clamours for theirteaching, they find no time for the backward scholar. We are the duncesof the school, and are dismissed without learning the accomplishmentsset forth upon the prospectus. That is why in our northern streets somany seeming hats are cowls. 

In England the loss of congenial intercourse is perhaps more certainthan in other lands. For through his national reserve thehighly-cultured Englishman has a cold perfection of good breeding towhich heartiness is vulgarity; he emanates intimidation, and in courtesyis rather studious than spontaneous, seldom genial but in an ancientfriendship. If you knew him to the concealed heart, and were suffered toassay the fine metal beneath this polished surface, you would win agolden friendship; but only on a desert island would he permit theoperation. To the shy who may encumber his path his bearing seems markedby an indifference which they magnify into aversion, and are thereby theworse confounded. In a land where such convention reigns they go throughlife like persons afflicted with a partial deafness; between them andthe happier world there is as it were a crystalline wall which thepleasant low voices of confidence can never traverse. 

I say, then, that the real, the enduring shyness is that inveteration ofreserve to which a few men in a few countries are miserably condemned. Others know it as a transient inconvenience, as the croup or measles ofchildhood; but in us it is obstinate and ineradicable as grave disease. If out of the long frustration of our efforts to be whole some strain ofbitterness passes into our nature; if sometimes we burn with unjustresentment against the fate which, suffers such lives as ours to beprolonged, let it be remembered in extenuation that to those who bear adouble burden human charity owes the larger kindliness. For though likeyou we bear our share of common troubles, O happier men and women, thecommon pleasures and compensations which are as wings upon yourshoulders are heavy packs on ours. The cheerful contrasts are for youalone; for us the bright threads interwoven in the dark stuff of lifewere faded before they reached the loom. 

You who have the friendships and affections without which you would notcare to live a day, think more kindly of those to whom the interludes oftoil are often harder than the toil itself. Of your charity believe ourfate ordained and not the choice of our own perversity; for what manborn of woman would choose a path so sad, were there not within him someguiding and possessing devil which he could in nowise cast out? Neverwill in maddest hours of freedom consented to such doom; we werecondemned at birth, our threads were spoiled upon the fingers of theNorns. 

 * * * * *

Such in its broader outlines seemed the infirmity which had grown withmy growth, and now had to be reckoned with, like the bridle of Theages, as a permanent hindrance to a reasonable happiness. Old hopes layshattered about me--well, I had to pick up the fragments and piecetogether a less ambitious ideal. 

I will not linger over the forces which helped my resolution, the greatand general remedies which come to the relief of men in like evil case. Religion, philosophy, art, science, literature--all promised theiranodynes against despair; slowly they stirred in me anew those springsof interest in life which disillusion seemed to have choked for ever. Irose up, and looking round upon the world saw that it was still good;and there came into my memory brave words which a golden book puts inthe mouths of its indomitable knights: "I will take the adventure whichGod shall ordain me. " I now perceived that if evil fortune had unhorsedme it had yet left me endurance to continue the combat on foot. Mysecond failure was more final and disastrous than the first discomfiturein earlier life, but now the plague of pessimism was stayed by agreater recuperative power. Those long hours of the long eastern day, spent under the verandah with books of many ages and languages, had notbeen altogether fruitless; they had helped to mature a wider and morecatholic taste than that of restless youth, the kind of culture thatbrings not rebellion but peace. 

In my eastern watch-tower I had re-read the great books from a new pointof vantage, and let the eye roam over fields of literature which liebeyond the undergraduate's bounds; by a still permeation of fineinfluence, my crude philosophy was unconsciously mellowed, as thesurface of ivory, according to Roman belief, by the bland air of Tibur. For by the mere being in an atmosphere of serenity our nature growsporous to gracious influences streaming in we know not how or when, andtaking their abode in our very grain and structure. And so withoutconsciousness of good desert, I found myself confident in a newdiscipline, and looking for the word of command from wiser leaders thanByron or the youthful Shelley. Queen Mab was now the saddest rhetoric, and Childe Harold's plaint unseemly lamentation; I had erased from mycalendar of saints the names of apostles of affliction once held inhonour; the Caliph Amurath with his tale of fourteen happy days out of along life of royal opportunity; Swift with his birthday lection fromJeremiah. Rather there trooped into memory with a quiet pomp andinduction of joy, forms of men who, though justified in rebellion byevery human suffrage, remained loyal to the end and proved by endurancea more imperial humanity. Socrates unperturbed by mortal injustice;Dante a deep harmonious voice amid jangling destinies; William theSilent serene in every desperate conjecture--these seemed now the moreperfect captains. If exile had done no more than transfer my allegianceto such as these, I had not borne the lash in vain. 

But at the first setting out upon this later stage I had still mistakesto make, and the ascent to tranquillity was not to be accomplishedwithout stumbling. It was the old Roman creed which first drew me awayfrom fretting memories; in its high restraint, as of a hushed yet mightywind, it breathed a power of valiant endurance, and promised beforenightfall the respite of a twilight hour. For stoicism has qualitieswhich seem foreordained for the bracing of shy souls, as if the men whoframed its austere laws had prescience of our frailty and consciouslylegislated to its intention. It is the philosophy of the individualstanding by himself, as the shy must always stand, over against a worldwhich he likes not but may not altogether shun. And in this proudestrangement it promises release from all the inquisition of morbidfears, and an imperturbable calm above the need of earthly friends orcomfort or happiness; it plants the feet upon that path of nature alongwhich a man may go strongly, consoled in solitude by a god-like sense ofself-reliance. This immutable confidence is the essential power ofstoicism, which does not, like the great oriental religions, tamepersonality by ruthless maiming, but teaches it to bear the brunt ofadversities erect, like an athlete finely trained. Its very arrogance, its sufficiency, perforce commend it to those whose instinct urges toself-abasement: its lofty disregard of adverse circumstance is medicalto their timidity. 

And so in the hour of my bereavement its voice inspired to resistancelike a bugle sounding the advance; its echoes rang with the assurancethat man was not made to be the worm of Eden, darkly creeping in thedust, but rather its noblest creature, with the light crowning his headand the winds tossing his hair. And then its strong simplicity, somasculine and unemotional, was grateful to one now finally dismated, andso cruelly handled as to have, it seemed, no use for a heart any more. Better let feeling die than be betrayed by diffidence into the denial ofits true allegiance, or into expressions of the inner life false and wryas the strange laughter which the doomed suitors in Ithaca could notcontrol. Though it stifled feeling, the creed of Cleanthes exalted theintellect, which was all that now remained to me unimpaired; surely itwas the appointed rule for one henceforth to be severed from thepassions and enthusiasms through which humanity errs and is happy. 

"The world, " the wise Stoic seemed to say, "is twofold in its nature. Some things may be changed by man, others are by his utmost effortimmutable. God has implanted in you a right reason by which, when it iswell trained, you can infallibly distinguish between the two, avoidingthus all unworthy fretfulness and all idle kicking against the pricks. Therefore he has made you for happiness; for the joy of men is anachievement; and their misery in the coveting of the unattainable end. If you would fulfil his benevolent design, seek only what has beenplaced in your power, frankly resigning all that lies beyond; but beever difficult in renunciation; test and sound well every issue, lestyou leave a permitted good undone, than which nothing is a greater sin. To be loyal, to be contented, to acquiesce in all things save only inameliorable evil, this is to live according to nature, which is God'sadministration. If you are assiduous in careful choosing, you will learnat last to make a right use of every event; you will be harassed nomore by vain desire or unreasoning aversion, but will become God'scoadjutor and be always of his mind. So, when external things haveceased to trouble your spirit, you will no longer be a competitor forvanities; but, enfranchised from all solicitude, you will have discardedenvy and conceit and intolerance, which are the ill fruits of that vainrivalry. You will neither cringe before power nor covet great place, foralike from inordinate affection and from the fear of pain or death youwill be free. Disenamoured of mundane things, you will live simply andunperturbed, in kindness and cheerfulness and in gratitude toProvidence. Life will be to you as a feast or solemnity, and when itcomes to a close, you will rise up saying, 'I have been well and noblyentertained, it is fit that I give place to another guest. '"

The strength and mastery thus promised raised my dejected spirits, asthe words of a new and sanguine physician may hearten one who had longlain stricken yet now dares to hope for the day of recovery. This was alaw which did not denounce the world as illusion or enjoin a cloistralseclusion upon the mind, but rather proposed each and every appearanceas a touchstone on which the quality of personality should beunceasingly tried. By the constant application of a high standard tolife, it seemed to implant an incorrupt seed of manliness, and to createin its disciples that saner mood which holds in equal aversion aHeliogabalus and a Simeon Stylites. So persuaded, I could join with thefervour of a neophyte in the Stoic's profession: "Good and evil are inchoice alone, and there is no cause of sorrowing save in my own errantand wilful desires. When these shall have been overcome, I shall possessmy soul in tranquillity, vexing myself in nowise if, in the world'sillusive good, all men have the advantage over me. For all outwardthings I will bear with equal mind, even chains or insults or greatpain, ashamed of this only, if reason shall not wholly free me from theservitude of care. Let others boast of material goods; mine is theprivilege of not needing these or stooping to their control. I willhave but a temperate desire of things open to choice, as they are goodand present, and the tempter shall find no hold for his hands by whichto draw me astray. I will be content with any sojourn or any company, for there is none, howsoever perilous, which may not prove andstrengthen the defences of my soul. For I have built an impregnablecitadel whence, if only I am true to myself, I can repel assaults fromthe four quarters of heaven. Who shall console one lifted above therange of grief, whom neither privation nor insolence can annoy? for hehas peace as an inalienable possession, and by no earthly tyranny shallbe perturbed. Bearing serenely all natural impediments to action, trespassing beyond no eternal landmark, by no foolishness provoked, heshall become a spectator and interpreter of God's works; he shall ripento the harvest in the sunshine and wait tranquilly for the sickle, knowing that corn is only sown that it may be reaped, and man only bornto die. "

The mere repetition of these words, so instinct with the spirit of oldRoman fortitude, roused me to a more immediate resolution than anyother form of solace. There are times when a splendour of exaggerationis the best foil to truth. The Roman's pride is the best corrective tothe earthward bias of the diffident; by its excess of an opposite defectit drives us soonest into the mean of a simple and manly confidence. Itis better for us first to repeat, "Dare to look up to God and say: Makeuse of me for the future as Thou wilt, I am of the same mind, I am equalwith Thee.... Lead me whither Thou wilt, " than to dwell upon such wordsas these: "It is altogether necessary that thou have a true contempt forthyself if thou desire to prevail against flesh and blood"--or these:"If I abase myself ... And grind myself to the dust which I am, Thygrace will be favourable to me, and Thy light near unto my head.... Byseeking Thee alone and purely loving Thee I have found both myself andThee, and by that love have more deeply reduced myself to nothing. "

This supreme abnegation may leave the saint unharmed, but it is illfitted for those who droop already with the malady of dejection. Thedivine wisdom which knows the secrets of all hearts and theirnecessities infinitely various, shall exact obedience according to noadamantine law: it loves not the jots and tittles of formalism, nor thepretensions of those who would cast all things in one mould. From thosemade perfect, from the saints whose links with earth are almost severed, whose sight begins to pierce gross matter through, it may acceptprostration and endless contrite tears, knowing that to these, upon thevery verge of illumination, the forms of slavery have lost theirvileness. But to those who are still of earth and can but conceive God'sfatherhood according to earthly similitudes, it will not ordain a proneobeisance. Such it will require to stand erect even in contrition, inthat posture which is the privilege of sons. We who are unperfectedaffront God supposing him pleased with the prostration of his children. It is the ignorance of a feudal age that ascribes to him a Byzantinelove of adulation; but that age is no more, and he disserves the divinemajesty who imputes to it a liking for the _esprit d'antichambre_. 

I did not need to dwell upon my weakness and misery but rather upon thegrandeur of humanity, whose kinship and collaboration God himself doesnot reject. The Stoic phase was a useful stage on the road ofconvalescence, and the majestic words of Epictetus more helpful to amanlier bearing than the confessions of the saintliest souls. If, as isnot to be doubted, there are others who seek an issue from the same darkregion where I wandered, I do not fear to point them to the Stoic way, which like a narrow gorge cold with perpetual shadow is yet theirshortest path upward to the high slopes lit with sunlight. Let thementer it without fear and endure its shadows a while, for by other waysthey will fetch a longer compass and come later to their release. 

But when some interval had passed I became aware that this cold idealwas not the end, and that out of the gall of austerity sweetness shouldyet come forth. Wise men have said that all great systems of ethicsmeet upon a higher plane, as the branches of forest trees rustletogether in the breeze; for though in the dark earth their roots creepapart, their summits are joined in the freedom of clear air. As I nowstruck inland from the iron shores of shipwreck, my heart warmed to abrighter and softer landscape, and with Landor I began to wish that Imight walk with Epicurus on the right hand and Epictetus on the left. With a later thinker I reflected that if the Stoic knew more of thefaith and hope of Christianity, the Epicurean came nearer to itscharity. For it is true that Stoicism commands admiration rather thanlove. It was indeed too harsh a saying that "the ruggedness of the Stoicis only a silly affectation of being a god, to wind himself up bypulleys to an insensibility of suffering": that is the judgment of thebluff partisan, so shocked by the adversary's opinions that he feelsabsolved from any effort to understand them. But even those who inextremity have been roused to new valour by the precepts as by a Tyrtæanode, for all the gratitude which they owe, will not impute to theirdeliverers an inhuman perfection. The Stoic does in truth wear asemblance of academic conceit, as though related to God not as a childto its father, but as a junior to a senior colleague. And with all itssufficiency, his philosophy seems too Fabian in its counsels; it isalways withdrawing, passing by on the other side, avoiding battle--sothat as a preparation for the uttermost ordeal it will often proveinferior to the reckless pugnacity of a narrow zealot. 

Then, too, it acts like a frost not merely upon personal, but uponnational ambition, and so keeps the wellspring from the root. Itsassumption of a superhuman fortitude accords but ill with scientifictruth, for if with one bound every man may become as God, he willdespise that infinitely slow upward progression which is the only realadvance. But, above all, it lives estranged from tenderness, in whichalone at certain hours of torment the distracted mind finds God's facereflected. It preaches renunciation of all vain aversions and desires;but it repels sweet impulses that are not vain. By exalting apathy inregard to personal suffering, it becomes insensible to others' painalso. In the conviction that appeals for sympathy are avowals ofunworthiness, it will have no part in the love of comrades, and it neverdiscovered the truth that the strength and the compassion of the Divineare one perfection. 

There is a favourite mediæval legend depicted in one of the windows ofthe cathedral at Bourges, which exposes in a characteristic fashion thisweakness of the Stoic's creed. The Evangelist St John, when at Ephesus, remarked in the forum the philosopher Cratinus giving a lesson ofabnegation to certain rich young men. At the teacher's bidding theyouths had converted all their wealth into precious stones, and thesethey were now bidden crush to dust with a heavy hammer in the presenceof the assembled people, that so they might make public profession oftheir contempt for riches. But St John was angered at so wasteful arenunciation. "It is written, " he said, "that whoso would be perfectshould not destroy his possessions, but sell them, and give the proceedsto the poor. " "If your master is the true God, " replied Cratinusscornfully, "restore these gems again to their original form, and thenthey shall be bestowed according to your desire. " St John prayed, andthe precious stones lay there once more perfect in all their brillianceand splendour. The moral of the old tale is clear--that all virtuewithout charity is nothing worth; and that of virtue without charity, the Stoic's cold renunciation is the chief type and ensample. 

The insight into this higher truth did not come by inspiration, but wasgradually imparted during long summer days, when I wandered from dawn todark among the fields and woods. Hoping at first no more than to tirethe mind with the body and so win a whole repose, I became by degreesreceptive of a new learning from nature, which created new sympathiesand kindled fresh ambitions. Naturally I again read Wordsworth, and nowfor the first time since childhood I knew what joys intimacy brings. Iwas one of a brotherhood, and wherever I went was sure of a friendlysalutation. Things that grew in silence became my friends; I was withthem at all hours, in light and shadow, in warmth and cold, watchingtheir gracious and responsive existences, which reject no good gift, butradiantly grow towards the light while it endures. Insensibly the spiritof this gentle expansive life was infused within me, until the heartwhich I had deemed useless and outworn, began to open like a flowerscathed by frost, at the full coming of spring. The plants and treeswere human to me, the brooks spoke with articulate voice; by thatancient witchery of animism, old as the relationship of man and nature, I was put to school again: until at last, absorbed in the vicissitudesof small things and surrendering reason to a host of pathetic fallacies, I was taught the great secret that life may not be centred in itself, but in the going out of the heart is wisdom. And as among human friendsthere are some to whom a man is bound by deeper and tenderer links thanto the rest, so it is with these other friends which have no language, but only the wild-wood power of growing about the heart. Among theirgracious company each man will discover his own affinity, and havingfound it will look on the rest of nature with brighter eyes. Some learnthe great lessons from mountains, lakes, and sounding cataracts; othersfrom broad rivers peacefully flowing to the sea. To me there spoke nosuch romantic voices. My wanderings led me through a country of simplerural charm, and the friends that became dearest to me were just ourEnglish elms. 

Who but the solitary, artists alone excepted, understand the full charmof elms in an English landscape? To us there is an especial appeal intheir loneliness, as they range apart along the hedgerows, embayed inblue air and sunlight which do but play upon the fringe of your huddlingforest. See them on a breezy August morning across a tawny corn-field, printing their dark feathery contours on a blue sky and holding theshadows to their bosoms; or on a June evening get them between you andthe setting sun, and mark the droop and poise of the upper foliagefretted black upon a ground of red fire. Here are no cones orhemispheres, or shapeless bulks of green, but living beings ofarticulated form, clothed in verdure as with the fine-wrought draperythat enhances rather than conceals the beauty of the statue. 

Or at a still later hour, over against the harvest moon, see them risecongruous with the gentle night, casting round them not palls of ominousgloom, but clear translucent shadows sifted through traceries of leafagewhich do but veil the light. And what variety of form and structuresunders them from other trees, what irregular persuasive grace. Some aretall and straight, springing like fountains arrested in the moment whenthey turn to fall; others bend oblique without one perpendicular line, every branch by some subtle instinct evading the hard angles ofearth-measurement as unmeet for that which frames the sky; others againspread to all the quarters of heaven their vast umbrageous arms. Notrees are so companionable as the elms to the red-roofed homestead whichnestles at their feet and is glad for them. Seen from a distance, howdelightful is this association, how delicate the contrast of tile andleaf and timbered barn, each lending some complement to the other'sfairest imperfection. Perhaps there will be a whole line of distincttrees, and then you will see as it were a cliff-side of verdure inwhich, beneath the billowy curves of lit foliage, there open caverns andcool deeps of shadow fit for a Dryad's rest. 

To know the elm-tree you must not come too near, for it too is wild anddoes not reveal its nature lightly; you may be cooler in the shadow ofthe beech or stand drier beneath the red-stemmed leaves of the sycamore. Yet it suffers the clinging ivy; it was beloved of poets in old days, and painters love it still. It has not the walnut's vivid green nor therare flush that lights up the pine-stem. Its leaves are rough and of nobrilliance; its bark is rugged also. But in life the familiar guardianof home meadows, it has stood by our fathers' landmarks from generationto generation, and when fallen and hewn and stacked it sheds afragrance which, wherever perceived in after years, brings back memoriesof wanderings in deep lanes and of the great dim barns where we playedin childhood. In the dull winter days when only yews and cypresses weartheir leaves, I sometimes wander to a place whose walls are hung withthe works of many a seer and lover of elms; there seated before a fewsmall frames I give them thanks for having read the dear trees truly, and glorified a close and barren gallery with all the breezes andcolours of the fields: I am beyond all noise and murkiness, walking inthe peace and spaciousness of unsullied air. 

To a mind now happily reverted to the primitive confidence in soulseverywhere indwelling and creating sympathies between all things, thebonds of kinship between man and nature were drawn ever closer, and itseemed a wholly natural belief that the changes of the visible universe, affecting things which lived an almost personal existence, should beinstinct with the deeper meaning of events in the drama of humanexistence. 

Like the every-day life of men with its imperceptible attritions was theinsensible growth and decay of things; as the tumult of his emotionswere the storms and catastrophes that convulse the face of nature. Themovement never ceased; the transforming power was never wearied; thespectator had but to give rapt attention, to be carried beyond his poorsolicitudes to a participation in elemental processes of change in whichthe fates of humanity were mysteriously involved. The thought of thisindissoluble union kept alive the sense of brotherhood within me, ofresponsibility in life, of interest in all that happens; and whether itwas the daily contraction of a pond in drought, or a battle of ants bythe wayside, or the first tinge of autumn upon the woods, all wasennobled by symbolic relationships to man's experience, which in theunceasing flow of their perception were lustral to a solitary heart, without them choked and stagnant. 

There was a certain heath-clad ridge which like a watch-tower set abovea city never failed to bring before the ranging eye some visionpregnant of those emotions by which the sense of humanity is quickenedto a deeper consciousness of itself. The witchery of space was therealways, and seemed to draw from the soul the clinging mists of herindifference. It was there that I saw nature in all her moods, and feltthat to each my own moods responded; there that despondency, imaginingher monotony of woe, was confuted by the saving changefulness of createdthings. I remember one day, when a summer storm was spending its fury, Istood upon this ridge and looked across the low lands that stretchedaway beneath me. They lay with all their boundaries confused by a pallof purple gloom, then darkly transparent, and dissolving before thereturning sun, whose penetrative influence was felt rather than actuallyperceived. As I gazed, high in the veil of cloud there began faintly togleam a spot of palest gold, so high that it seemed to belong to the skyand to have no part in an earthly landscape. Gradually it expanded, grewmore vivid, and assumed form, other forms and tints emerged beside it, until at last it was revealed as a ripe corn-field on the high slopesacross the valley, and before many moments had passed, a long line ofdowns stood out in the pure air with a sculptural clearness, as ifduring the storm all had been uprooted and moved a whole league towardsthe spot where I stood. While the rainbow spanned the plain, and thethunder still rolled in the distance, all the opposite heaven clearedalmost to the furthest horizon; but there a remoter range yet layhalf-covered by a billowy mass of clouds, like the hull of a dismastedship in the folds of her fallen sails. At last even this trace of thebattle was gone; the sun shone unopposed; the wet lands and clear skywere lit with an intenser brightness for their transient eclipse. 

Then the humanity of all these things was borne in upon my mind, and Iwas affected by these vicissitudes shadowing forth the destiny of man, and reminding him in their beautiful and majestic procession that natureendures no perpetual gloom. The sudden ruin of a bright day in delugeand darkness and sonorous thunder, the timid reappearance of faintlight, the natural forms strangely emerging from the perplexed wrackinfesting the heaven, and at last seen as never before through leaguesof pellucid air; the thunder's silence, the final and supreme triumph oflight;--these swift yet utter revolutions of the visible world, by verygrace of mutability, were rich with instant consolations for the soul'smisgiving. They served to remind me that the fears, the spiritualconflicts, the darkness that seems eternal, are mere incidents of asummer noon and leave behind them a purer and serener day. Through allthis close intercourse with nature my mind was being prepared for ahealthier relation to my fellow-man, and my heart saved from thepetrification of melancholy self-regard. The ever-growing delight inthese inanimate things, the constant discovery of new charms asknowledge widened with experience, united to prevent stagnation anddespair; they kept heart and mind alert for the perception of newglories; and it is from a clear sense of their salutary power that Idwell upon them in this record of a self-tormented life. How should hefind life colourless whose eyes are often fixed upon the sky, who seesgrey zones of cloud flush crimson before the sunrise, and at evening thewide air richly glowing, moted as with the bloom of plums and the goldenpollen of all flowers?

At the end of that summer I returned to the occupations of life, appeased and almost happy in this inheritance of new sympathies. Andbefore long I found that these were themselves but precursors of thatwhich was to come, and that like the paranymphs who escort the bride, they did but apparel the heart for a deeper and more abiding joy. Theywere busied about me in tranquil hours, and speaking not, but seeming towait in gladness for another, they made me serenely expectant also. Theydestroyed all sadness of retrospect; they led me always forward; withfaces transparent with the light of an inward happiness they seemed topromise a vision at each near bending of the way. From glad looks andgestures assuring imminent joy, I too was charmed into a like faith, andwent on blithely in the confidence of a coming illumination. Nor wasthat hope vain, for at length the mystery was made plain, and one daythey brought me exulting into the presence of the Ideal Love. 

There is a place in every heart which must be filled by adoration, orelse the whole will grow hard and wither like a garden whose centralfountain is grown dry. And though the affection of mortal man or womanmay abandon it, there remains yet this other love which by pure andstrenuous invocation may be drawn to it, and dwell in it, to theennoblement of life; so great is the care of providence for mortal need. Love is our need, and it is given, if we despair not of it, even to suchas have rarely felt the glow of earthly passion. For love is of manykinds; yet the palest and most subtle of its forms are made real tothose who believe, and may become the guiding influences of their lives. Such are the visions of the ideal love to which those glad naturalsympathies now led me, leaving me alone awhile that I might worship theorient light. And when I came out from that presence I rejoiced indeed, for the path was clear for my return, and life was now glad with promiselike an orchard burgeoning with white blossoms. Old memories crowdedback on me of hours beneath the cedars with the Phædrus and the VitaNuova, hours made happy with intellectual and austere delights. But nowthe joy was other than intellectual, though significant tenfold, forthen in untried youth I had wondered at the beauty of an imaginaryworld; now with eyes that had looked on desolation I perceived thatthese visions were true. For had they been no more than airy fancies, they surely had not endured throughout these long ages in our laden andmortal air. 

It was not merely the beauty of a literary setting which had preservedthem: the craftsman's skill might indeed have enhanced their naturalsplendour, but it could not have alone inspired them with this perenniallife. The gem with fire in its heart outlives the delicate setting;though it may be maltreated and buried for centuries by the wayside, itwill come to light when the gold that framed it is long battered orlost, and will be desired by new generations for its inherent andunalterable beauty. 

Not Plato's or Dante's creative power, but truth surviving allincarnations of genius, has kept this celestial gem aglow: they have butcelebrated that which was never mortal, and guided wandering eyes toheaven's most beautiful star. This intangible and unincarnate visionexacts more from its votaries than the love which walks the earth:holding the lover ever in the strain of apprehension, it inures him tounwearying worship, and itself moving in regions incorruptible, neverloses the glory of its first hour. The years may pass, but one face, like a hallowed thing, abides continually; years may fret and corrodeother ideals, but to this they add beauties of ever fresh significance. The auroral glow is always round it, brightening the world, until itbecomes an emblem of illumination and the symbol of eternal truths. Thisvisionary presence wakes aspiration to new effort and touches theintellect with passion; beleaguered thought sallies out with newstrength, and the frontiers of darkness recede before it. From thiscomes the quickening of the heart without which hope wanes and the mindis barren: the deep pure joy of contemplation awakens all that is bestin the soul, which goes towards it on tense wings of desire. And as withtime it draws further from the earth, and, following, the soul essaysever higher flights, it is often poised at a great height as in a tranceof motion, whence it looks back upon the world it has left, and round itupon other worlds. Then, its love-range being wondrously expanded, itsees beyond that visionary countenance, which dissolves and forms againlike a delicate wreath of mist; and clear starlight falls upon it fromevery side, so that all shadow is destroyed. And when it returns toearth again, and is forced to contemplate meaner things, it is now awarethat the very soil is compacted of dust of stars, and that he who lookslistlessly upon creation is unworthy of the human name. And socontinually flying forth and returning, it weaves endless bonds betweenthe infinitesimal and the infinite, forgetting how to despise, which isthe heavenly science. 

All this ardour is awakened and sustained by love, which began in senseand is now transformed. Through each succeeding change it is known forthe same divine power which has so attuned the body that it vibrates nomore to desire alone, but is now become resonant beneath a faint andspiritual breath. 

It is an old story that love is sightless, but that is the love whichromps among the roses and is blinded by their thorns. There is anotherand a better tradition that love's eyes pierce heaven, and this is agreat truth; for infinity is cold and vaporous until man projects uponit his mortal ideal, his conception of an earthly love transfigured. When this beloved guide appears throned above him as in the clouds, hedares to lift his eyes, and there he reads through its light the divinepurports of his existence. Is it a small thing to stand, though but fora moment, searching infinity undismayed? This is the celestial ocean towhose shore he is come; and now "drawing towards and contemplating thevast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts andnotions in boundless love of wisdom, until on that shore he grows andwaxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a singlescience, which is the science of beauty everywhere ... Beauty absolute, separate, simple, everlasting, which without diminution, withoutincrease, or any change, is imparted to the ever growing and perishingbeauties of all other things. "

To some the great perception comes but late, rising from the ashes oflove's common furnace. But they whose hearts have never been consumed inthese roaring flames may find it earlier; and purged from all taints ofjealousy and covetousness, may pass straightway into the bliss of ahigher union. This is that supreme affiance and espousal of the soulwherein they may be released into a larger air, undelayed by theearthward longings and gradual initiations of seemingly happier men. Thus its servants do not decline into slothful service, but arestrenuous always; raised above the acquiescence of use, they never knowthe cloying of fruition or suffer the barbarian conquest ofindifference. Their soul is unaffected by material circumstance ormisfortune, and illuminates their lives as often as in the silent hourof meditation they concentrate their thoughts upon its grace. The cup ofearthly love, even the noblest, is often dipped in Pyriphlegethon, andthe draught it offers scathes the palate until its finest sensibility isfor ever dulled. Those who have quaffed this liquid fire can no longerunderstand his mood who leaves the roses and the wine to toil throughdeserts in search of limpid water. They think him madly ungrateful forGod's good gifts, a fool abandoning joy proved and present for a shadowfar and incomprehensible. But they who have not denied themselves are nolonger fit judges of him who has renounced. They cannot know that bythis renunciation the senses are thrice refined, and receive as a vitalinfluence the stellar beam which falls chill and ineffectual upon agrosser frame. They cannot believe that this love from the infinitedistance wields as mighty a force over renunciant lives as the nearflame of passion over their own. But, for all their denial, it lives andpuissantly reigns. It reigns in very truth predominant, this ideal loveto which space exists not and propinquity is nothing; and it will havenone for its subjects but those who by bereavement or aspiration orintense purity are inly prepared for its dominion. 

Happy therefore are the shy if in the midst of their tribulation theyare guided to the gateway of so bright a kingdom. It may well be that wemust first be led thither by some dear-remembered and virgin form oncealmost ours through earthly love, but now joined to us only by animperishable and mystic union. Our sight may at first need the embodiedbeauty to give it the finer powers by which the revelation of the idealgrows familiar to us, but is at last attainable without mortalintervention by an immediate flight of the soul. Until that late day ofenlightenment we must still be set upon the celestial path by a touchof human tenderness; a pure yet sensuous yearning must be ours when weare first girded to the ascent. If there are beings which attain thefulness of the ideal love without the first inspiration of a fairearthly form I know nothing in creation to which they may be likened, nor had I ever part in so rare an enfranchisement. The vision that nowentrances my soul first arose from a living, breathing form radiant withearthly brightness and instinct with every charm which brings menfawning to the feet of women. The sensuous frenzy which lovers sing wasalso mine, the tremor of the heart, the vibration of the very life; thedeep seventh wave of passion rioted through me also. But from the firstamazement of the shaken being it was not given me to pass throughsatisfaction into tranquillity; I was held long in a whirl of trouble;in the anguish of denial I learned initiation into the mystery which iseternal and supreme. 

It is good for some of earth's children that passion should be stayedbefore it makes ashes of the fancy; for if it does but touch for amoment only to be withdrawn for ever, it does not destroy, but by itsmeteoric passage kindles the imagination with the glow of anincorruptible flame. It is with them long enough to brand upon memorythe image which, though never renewed before their bodily eyes, by itsvery severance from perception puts on an immortality of virginal grace. Love is understanding, said the poet of Heaven and Hell, and loveennobled through renunciant years shall at the last encompass the world. The sensuous glow that first quickened the heart of youth is transmutedinto a purer fire akin to that which moves the spheres. 

To know this truth is their compensation who are swiftly withdrawn fromthe warm radiance of earthly love. They are stricken, but before passionblinds them are rapt into a high solitude, whence, if they truly love, an infinite prospect is unrolled before them. They know desire; but astheir passion was hopeless in this world, their steps were mercifullyset upon a new path, whereby the bodily semblance of the beloved becamethe symbol of spiritual comeliness, alluring the beholder into thepeace of a serene and unworldly mood. A thin and rarefied ideal, yousay, a mirage which no wayfarer can approach: experience rejects thesesubtleties, and to these creations of a dream human affection was nevergiven. True, to hearts established and content in happy unions, to mindspreoccupied with the near cares and pleasures of a home, our distantvisions may appear frail structures wrought in mist by homeless fancy. But for the exiled heart they are not such, but verities of abidinginspiration. For the ideal love did not die with Plato, but came againin mediæval Italy, and who shall say that even our material age hasbanished it from the earth?

No indeed it is not dead, the ideal love, but indwells, a redeemingpower, wherever there are desolate hearts and minds to be updrawn andunited by its ministry; a power so lustral in its nature, that no abjectand despairing thought creeps into its presence but is purified andexalted by its regard. This love brings hope and cheerful constancy;with a shining falchion it affrights into their natal darkness themonstrous forms of despair, and lends to all work a secret charm ofchivalry. It sustains that high anticipatory mood to which life is but apreparation, and the bees buzzing round the honey-flowers seem poorthings toiling for an inessential gain. Because it is mystic andtranscendental it is the predestined guide of all whom fate holdsremoved from earthly love. This is the old device of the world'sfailures, you say, to trick themselves out in Plato's mantle or theschoolman's cowl, and conceal their spite beneath the pretensions of themystic. But I answer that the causes which moved the Greek and theFlorentine are still at work among mankind to-day; they have neverceased, however much obscured by the glare of triumphant luxury or thestress of miserable toil. Often when disillusion has laid bare a soul, this love which did but slumber awakes to contest with envy or despairthe possession of a wounded heart. I aver that any exile from thehappier earth whose heart is pure, if he invokes this love with ardentfaith, may unbar his door and feel that it has passed his threshold. Let us never be persuaded that the ideal world is far from this earth ofours, or that the way to it may not be daily traversed by him who hassubmitted to the heavenly guide. Not even the close entanglement ofcommon cares can avail to keep such an one from his love; but as BishopBerkeley is said to have been able to pass in a moment from theconsideration of trifling things to the throne of thrones and the seatsof the Trinity, so this lover shall overpass with easy and habitualflight the barriers that hold most men life-long prisoners. 

For to the Spirit that is chastened and endures there is given a powerof flight and poise, by which, if it abandon itself to the celestialwind, it may instantly remove from the deeper planes of life, as a birdby the mere slanting of its wings is carried in proud quiescence into anupper region of the air. He shall know instant release from the leaguerof disillusion and vain solicitudes; in the light of one beautiful andcompassionate countenance the unquiet memories of failure shall give uptheir exceeding bitterness. 

And though the style and instinct of modern life are hostile to suchlove, though in prosperity it is ignored and in adversity oftenoverborne by a vain uproar of lamentation, yet even in a self-indulgentand furious world it still draws many to the severe exaltation of itsservice. We cannot approach the heights where a Plato and a Dante walkedwith ease, but far beneath upon the lower slopes we can draw a breath ofnew life as we fix our weaker eyes upon the glory which they saw sonear. Although the men who have there ascended are a supreme company, wemay yet presume to follow; for let it never be said that the gods havereserved for surpassing genius the consolation of which lesser men haveso much deeper need. But he who would reach a serener air must pressforward strenuously; for as a mountain may have one bare and northernslope, and another sunlit and clothed with verdure, and yet there may bea path on each side to the summit, so it is with the ascent to thisfelicity. One lingers amid pleasant groves and laughing waters;another, undistracted by the beauty of any lower zone, but fixing hiseyes upon the far summit, crosses the chill rocky slopes, never feelingthe warmth of the sun and only seeing his brightness reflected from thehighest peak. Though the ways of the two travellers lie far apart untilthe end, their endurance may be crowned with the same reward; but he whoknew no dalliance and plucked no fruit has from the beginning seen thegoal clearly, and lived steadfastly in its distant promise. And do youtell me that this is not love or joy, you who saunter in the verdantsouthern valleys breathing a present happiness with the perfume of athousand flowers? Your way may lead you upward after long vicissitudes, but endurance will more swiftly fail you for the last most arduousascent. Very love is of the heights, and he whose thoughts have longbeen thither exalted will breathe with least pain the attenuate upperair. 

To this pilgrimage the diffident are foreordained; it is their happiesthour when they take staff and scrip and set out in earnest for theshrine built among the mountains. The gardens of Armida are not forthem, nor the warm breezes fragrant of fruit and flowers; but the visionof a far peak flushed at sundawn draws them onward, and strength andpeace are increased upon them throughout the great ascent. He is stilltoo rich for pity to whom renunciation brings these high and enviablehours. 

But the heavens are not opened every day, and the adept of thesemysteries must walk the dull round of common life like other men, notwarmed as they are by the glow of constant friendship, yet cheered byintermittent flames of remembrance and of hope. The real life of thediffident is cunningly hidden from those around them, for whom, indeed, it is wont to have faint interest; but before you who have often soughtme out through fair and foul weather, I may venture to undo the pack ofsmall resources which brings variety and distraction into lonely days. 

Firstly, I still dare to haunt the forecourts of philosophy. Into herinner courts I may not penetrate, lacking the leisure which her wholeservice demands; yet the loiterings which I may still enjoy are to melike voyages into a foreign country, and give my mind the healthfulenjoyment of change; they are not long enough to bring that wholedetachment from daily life which, in my case, might prove a perilousadvantage. All that I need for common use is a simple rule based on afew fundamental thoughts to give me a course upon the wayward ocean, andthough it be full of error as the Almagest, yet it shall surpass thethumb-rules of Philistia. It must be a doctrine which allows imaginationher right and durable career, and therefore not be monist. Formaterialism is too wildly imaginative at the start: like a runner who atthe outset overstrains his heart and thereafter runs no more, thefollower of this creed, by his postulate of a blind impersonal Law, exhausts his power of speed and plods henceforth eyes downward overflattest plains of dulness. That my mind may remain curious and alert inisolation, I must conceive in the universal scheme a power that doesnot alone impel, but also draws me forward. For were it true that thesum of things blunders from change to change, swept by blind force intouncharted voids, I should abandon myself in despair to that hopelesscourse, and drift indifferent to the direction or the end. 

Let me rather believe that if each several idea is compacted by myactive intelligence out of some vast system of relations, then only asupreme intelligence akin to man's can brace together the whole systemor universal sum of things. For this earth, yes, and all the complex ofthe spheres, exist to me imperfectly as idea alone, nor can I conceivethem any complete existence apart from a kindred but omniscient mind. Each advance in human knowledge should then be an infinitesimal approachtowards the supreme comprehension; and the aspiring race of man isjustified in that inchoation of long hope which is folly to the singlelife. 

I would also believe that new relations between things may be detectednot merely by the staid and ordered process of collating abstractions, which is science, but by swifter and more genial methods of intuition. 

 "Hurrah for positive science, Long live exact demonstration!"

cried Walt Whitman, exulting over the filed fetters of mankind; and letus all echo the cry, nor ever forget the razed Bastilles ofsuperstition. But there glimmers a wealth of truth in the penumbrabeyond our lanterns to which science will creep too slowly without theaid of imagination. Yet this truth may be seized by swift sallies intothe darkness, and assured to us as it were by some dim apperception ofthe soul, when the whole personality is made tense, and subtlyanticipates the cosmic argument. Life is too short to renounce thisdaring: the sense of kinship with the All-Consciousness sanctions if notcommands the right adventure. 

It was this feeling which led William Blake to exclaim in his impulsiveway, that to generalize is to be an idiot, that direct perception isall, and the slow process of the inductive reason a devil'smachination. This method of intuition is to the more sober method ofscience as the romantic to the classical spirit in literature, permitting to the individual mind a licence of noble vagrancy. But itmust be a law for the ordinary intelligence to exercise the two apart, else it will fall into sick fancies of excitement, and by abuse of wildanalogies lose the vital art of balance and sane comparison. Only thegreatest minds, endowed as it were with some divine genius ofextrication, may dare to practise the two together. So Leonardo da Vincidrove inference and intuition abreast without disaster, and gatheredfrom purple distances of thought their wildest and most splendidflowers. To him, as has been well said, philosophy was something givingstrange swiftness and double sight, clairvoyant of occult gifts incommon or uncommon things. The doom of Phæton awaits those who now wouldfollow that marvellous course; but the poetic observation ofresemblances in things remote, which lent so rich a colour to thescience of the Renaissance, may yet be trained in all our minds; andthe philosophy which trusts in the slow suffusion of the worlds withintellectual light will bless and encourage its reasonable growth. 

Such a philosophy brings also a living sympathy with art. For the artistever sees a perfection of truth beyond his rendering, yet always callingfor expression; there is something eternally missed by his highesteffort, and he can never know complacency. The philosophy whichconceives the gradual growth of form through consciousness towards aperfection infinitely removed, yet in its remoteness drawing up our lifeas the moon sways the tides--this surely is the artist's wisdom. Idealism is like love, {apora porimos}, holding us as it were in touchwith the intangible: it will have us conceive the Absolute without thathelpless absorption in thought which changed Amiel's life from afountain to a vapour: it would keep us near the surf and confluence ofthings. Its function is not to give any mysterious transcendentalknowledge, but to serve culture "by suggesting questions which help todetect the passion, and strangeness and dramatic contrasts of life. "And not only to bring suggestions, but repose, by granting to eyeswearied with minute concerns the contrasts of vast times and spaces, themajestic idea of the Whole; to change the focus and variously disposethe perspectives of familiar things. 

An old watchmaker, whose window overlooked a wide meadow, used ever andagain to lay down his instruments to gaze out upon the expanse of green, pasturing upon it a wandering vague regard, and absorbing from it anassuagement of his wearied senses which, he said, served him moreeffectually after these bright interludes. The province of Metaphysicsshould be to us as to this wise workman his field; not a place to dreamour days away in, but for occasional resort; in which we may forget theinfinitesimal in healing visions of broad space and colour. I counselevery lonely man to satisfy what has been described as the commonmetaphysical instinct, and according to his powers to become ametaphysician. There is no discipline which so well consists withsolitude, none which so instantly enfranchises the mind from thetyranny of mean self-interest or vain and envious polemics. Men do notgrow sour and quarrelsome about the Absolute: everything that ispolemical is inspired, as Michelet once said, by some temporal andmomentary interest. The man who has climbed to the Idalian spring comesdown benevolent. He does not grudge this toiling ant his grain, thatsnarling dog his bone, but is content to live serene, in the certaintythat his soul has great provision, and that though all human things aresmall, each is worth its while. Into his hand there is given a scale bywhich life is known in its fair proportions; a tranquil joy, disturbedneither by dirges nor Epinician odes, is poured into his heart andexalts him above distraction. He respects himself as akin to that greatSelf whose perfection shall one day be known; he understands the passionfor the ideal through which men die young; he wonders at envy and in thehappiness of enfranchisement would have all men free. 

The pages of this Almagest are for the exceptional hour; but daily, asone bookish from the nursery, I read much in many directions. For ifbooks are called the best friends of happy men, to the sad they aresaviours also. And when I remember too clearly what I am, I turn perhapsmost often to Lucretius. For of all those who have taken up the pen toassuage the miseries of men, it is he who sings most bravely of thegreat endurance. This austere enthusiast, whose soul was never fused inthe fire of friendship; who went apart, as it were, amid thunders uponthe lonely heights; who, without any lover, yet loved his kind so wellthat all the years of his maturity, how short and splendid a period, were poured forth in one song of human consolation, --this man for allthe madness of his creed, was yet aflame with a wisdom to be calleddivine. That calm face, lit with one desire--to drive the furies fromthe way and soothe the frightened children of men, is ever among thenobler countenances which fancy summons about my bed. Over the anxiousheart they flow, those slow cadences, so vibrant yet so magnificentlypassionless, until the nerves of pain cease to throb, and fear shrinksas a taint impossible to the patient of such a physician. It is not histo intimidate or denounce, to evoke visions of lurid hell, to lingerover dire vaticinations, or apportion to each his grade of torment, butwith cool fingers to smooth the hair back from the forehead, and ingrave, tender accents to say: Sleep now, for it was a dream. 

Landor, in a fine passage, compared the merciful tolerance of the Romanpoet with the pitiless ire of Dante, contrasting in respect of thequality of mercy these two poets, one in their austere perfection, butso different in their vision of death, and judgment, and ultimatereward. The seer of lost worlds has written his own defence, and wasindeed but attacked to point the sharp antithesis; but Lucretius, thoughhe owes it to a literary feint, is very finely praised. And to me itseems that his compassionate mood increased upon him just because he wasnot emulous of the world's gifts or earnest for its pleasures, butwithdrew from the press, and lived out his few great yearscontemplating apart the vicissitudes of orbs and men. He did not wait inante-chambers or sit at wedding feasts; but severing all entangling andintricate threads of observance, followed the voice which called him tosolitary places of illimitable prospect. It was not through disillusionor injustice, or wounded pride, that he walked aloof; but loneliness washis birthright, and from the hills and headlands to which solitudeallured his steps he saw the dust of mad encounters rise to heaven, andthe rent sails of foundering galleys. He saw, and could not but be wrungwith pity for man deafened to wise counsel by the noise of vanities, andfiercely conspiring to precipitate his doom. As he went by shore andupland, there gathered in his mind those resonant hexameters of warningor consolation, those similes from the life of husbandry and dumbthings, which, set like diamonds in clay, lend to the most aridarguments their own incomparable splendour, or that homelier beautywhich instantly pierces the defences of the heart. Not diffident as we, but of a nature so infinitely absent and reserved that in the legendhis wife must concoct a philter to remind him of his love, he is of allthe pagans the best companion for our angrier moods. An archaic andelemental serenity is upon his language and thought, rebuking ourunprofitable petulance; if emotion gains him he finds utterance in thosetremendous periods "where single words seem to gather out of the deepand to reverberate like thunder. " As the reverberation dies away and theclouds are pierced by the sun, the world is seen in new lights throughan air clear as upon rain-swept mountains. 

As my reading is incessant, so also is my writing. For the happiness ofman is in his fertility, and of barrenness comes the worst despair. Tobe happy is to have issue--children, or books written, or thingsbeautifully wrought, or monuments of goodness to live after you, if onlyin the memory of some tiny hamlet of the folded hills. This is the lawof life that Diotima knew, by which flower and tree, animal and man, fulfil the end of their creation; and man in nothing more surely proveshis lordship than by his many-handed hold upon posterity. For the lowercreation is procreant in one way, but man in many; who may haveoffspring not of body alone but of mind and heart, and be so redeemedfrom the grim dismay of childlessness. The greatest human happiness isto be fertile in every way, a thing granted rarely in the world we know;the next, perhaps, is that of the parent who gives all of himself to hisfamily, not tilling any field beyond the charmed walls confining hisdesire. The author sure of his fame, the born artist, the benefactor ofhis kind, are also happy, seeing their offspring grow in years and inthe power of making a brighter world. 

But he is miserable who, aspiring to follow these, feels his force wanewithin him while he remains yet fatherless; or who has sons stillborn, or weakly, or dishonoured. I question whether sheer degradation intoevil brings more pain to man than such sense of sterility or frustrateparentage. But it is no small part of human redemption that none needknow the interminable misery. A man may have neither sons nor genius, but in the dark hour he can go out and give, if it be only a penny or akind word, and on that foundation build a temple to receive histhanksgiving. To give of yourself is good. This is that grand agreementand oecumenical consent to which those words _quod ab omnibus quodubique_ in deed and truth may be applied. For this reason meanness is ofthe deeps, and avarice groans in the lowest zone of hell. And if thereare faces of blank and permanent despair upon your path, be sure thatthese are not masks of whole men, but of those who wilfully abstainedfrom joy and have received the greater damnation. My children are mostlywritings, poor weakly creatures dying inarticulate and unchristened, tenderly remembered by myself only, but at least no nuisance to theworld. I loved them at their birth, I hold them in remembrance, thoughthey were ever of a hectic and uncertain beauty. 

The comparison of children with branches of the olive is not the mereornament of a Bible verse, but the wisdom of one who knew both tree andchild. For as children are bright creatures of swiftly changing moods, so are the olive leaves in the blue southern air. I once read of anartist who essayed to paint a group of olives and a cypress growingbefore them. Against their silvery leaves its dark burnished form stoodfinely mysterious, the contrasting grey lending it a depth of almostsable colour; all was propitious for his work. Then suddenly, the airbeing to all seeming quite still, the grey-green leaves began to shakeand quiver, until each olive tree was like a silver bonfire, tremulouswith a thousand waves of white flame flowing and following along thebranches. It was a revelation and swift effluence of life, perplexingand full of charm. The brush was laid down, the moment of inspirationgone, before the capricious leaves ceased their quivering to be robedonce more in grey, casting on the ground that translucent shadow whichtempers the sunlight only, and does not spoil it of its gold. In the endthe canvas was covered, but with a sketch far less true and beautifulthan the painter's first happy vision. Even so of all our children fewattain the perfection of our dreams. While we look, some influence comesupon them and they are changed, some breeze, born we know not where, stirs them to their heart of joy while we stand perplexed; innumerablelaughter of leaves, a rushing and a shivering in quick answer to a merebreath, silence as swift when unperceived it dies away--these are theirreplies to our silent invocations. We cannot follow the swift course, but are quickened with a glad rejuvenescence, the true prize and guerdonof parentage. They may grow old or die, or bring us sorrow; it is enoughthat once they so lived and stirred a pride within us. Let Hedonist andidealist dispute, let one worship pleasure and another wait on theintangible joy, but in the fathering and mothering and the bringing upof young children, of the flesh, the mind, or the spirit, lies thenatural happiness of men and women. It is a joy which outlastsdisillusions; it rests surely upon achievement and deserts which lieponderable in the archangel's scales. For it is certain that he whocreates as best he knows best serves God, the world and himself, andwhat system of Ethics has conceived a more perfect rule?

All young life is instinct with such a beauty and trustfulness, thatthough he himself may have no part or lot in its creation, and be dumbor awkward in its presence, a man will be the brighter for havingpassed, if but for a moment, out of the darkness of his own course intothe radiance within its orbit. To the diffident this is an especialgrace. For children by some deeper intuition understand us as theirparents cannot do; and when all the world is cold will often smile uponus with happy upturned faces. It is one of my consolations that thelittle players in the parks come running to me rather than to otherswith their eternal question after the exact hour of day. For I reflectthat though my face grows wrinkled and drawn with years, there must yethover something about its ugly surface which tells of a good willwithin. There was a time when I found the children's questionimportunate, and drew out my watch ungraciously; but now I feeldisappointment if during their hours of play I can walk my mile withoutanswering one of these high-pitched inquiries. 

To have the confidence of children is indeed a thing of which a poorwanderer may be proud, a credential confirming his self-respect, andworthy one day to be presented at the gate of heaven. Once during one ofmy worst hours of desolation, when I was tramping across the fields, Ifound a little maid of seven picking primroses on the edge of an oldorchard. For some time I stood watching, so charmed with the grace ofher movements and the beauty of the spring sunlight on her golden mane, that I lost all consciousness of present trouble, and beyond her fairyform began to see vague visions of lost happiness returning. As I stoodthus forgetful and looking absently before me, I suddenly felt a touchwhich recalled my scattered thoughts: she had come to me and put herhand in mine. I think in all my lonely life I never felt so swift athankfulness as that which suffused me then: the memory of it is alwayswith me, and now I never see a happy child engrossed in its little taskof duty or pleasure without thinking to myself there is one of those whotruly have power to remit sins. I will not repeat the fond things oftenwritten about children. Not all of them are like the infant angels ofBellini or Filippino Lippi or Carpaccio; some indeed are strident, pert, without charm or candour, not doves but little jays; but for theloveliness of those who have smiled upon me, whether rich or poor, whether wild or tended flowers, I shall ever hold the whole companydear. 

Whether I read or write, or go painfully upon difficult paths ofthought, like many other men whom the world dismays, I win a largertranquillity and a clearer vision from an increased simplicity of life. I know that to use the word asceticism of one's daily practice is toincur the judgment of all those whom the world calls good fellows, whosemotto is live and let live, or any other aphorism of convenient anduniversal remission. To them asceticism is the deterrent saintlinesswhich renounces all joy, and with a hard thin voice condemns theleanings of mankind to reasonable indulgence. The ill-favour drawn downby ecclesiastical exaggeration upon the good Greek word {askêsis}, whichmeans nothing more than the practice of fitness, has prejudiced menagainst all system of conduct bold enough to include it in theirterminology. 

Kant's chapter on the Ascetic Exercise of Ethics is a fine defence ofthat training of the heart and mind which has no affinity with themorbid discipline of hair shirt and scourge. "The ascetic exercise ofthe monasteries, " he says, "inspired by superstitious fear and thehypocritical disesteem of a man's own self, sets to work withself-reproaches, whimpering compunction and a torturing of the body. Itis intended not to result in virtue but to make expiation for sins, andby self-imposed punishment the sinners expect to do penance, instead ofethically repenting. " And again--"All ethical gymnastics consisttherefore singly in subjugating the instincts and appetites of ourphysical system ... A gymnastic exercise rendering the will hardy androbust, which by the consciousness of regained freedom makes the heartglad. "

This is sound doctrine, neither ungodly nor inhuman, the word of a manin whose veins the warm blood yet flowed. Few pictures of venerable ageplease more than that of the old philosopher of Königsberg drawn for usby de Quincey in one of his miscellaneous Essays. There we see ImmanuelKant, leading his tranquil sane existence, giving his friends soberentertainment, talking brightly of mundane things, practising "thehilarity which goes hand in hand with virtue. " For me the veryeccentricities of his daily routine have a fascination, and I read themas a devout Catholic reads many a quaint passage in the _ActaSanctorum_. How wise was his nightly habit, as he settled himself in bedbefore falling asleep, to asseverate with a sigh of thankfulness that noman living was more contented and healthier than he! Here is the trueasceticism, the child's glad abandonment to nature maintained and grownarticulate in philosophic age. 

To this beauty of plain life I cannot attain. But my own life is as farremoved as may be from brilliant or luxurious pleasures, and I divide mytime between the country and the town. This I do from obedience toreason rather than fashion; for while the country has my love, the cityis more remedial to my peculiar pain. There the shy man may have whatLamb called the perfect and sympathetic solitude, as opposed to the"inhuman and cavern-haunting solitariness, " to which his infirmityinclines. There he and those who rub shoulders with him on the pavementcan "enjoy each other's want of conversation. " No creature with a heartcan jostle daily with his kind, but he wins some consciousness of kindlyfeeling. The very annoyances and constraints of propinquity are in theirown way disciplinary, and insistent, uncongenial persons, like glaringred buoys with clanging bells, serve at least to keep us in the fairwayof navigation. And in a city there are voices of cheerful exhortationalways echoing in the higher air above the roar and the trampling, whichin the interludes of coarser sound, or by our removal into some quietcourt or garden, may be heard repeating their stirring watchwords ofendeavour. We are told that no word spoken ever dies, but goesreverberating through space for ever. It is my fancy that only evilwords escape into the outer void, which eternally engulfs theirprofitless message, while words of hope and helpfulness are not thuslightly sundered from the world that needs them, but hover still nearabove us, descending with every lull of the tumult into those ears whichare strained towards them. The laden air of towns carries not the rumourof the battle only, but by the presence of these fair echoes held withinit, gives back to the soul more health than ever it drew from the body. With this thought I am often consoled as I go my way through gloom andclamour and unloveliness, finding a Providence in places which else seemabandoned in the outer desolation. 

Nor is the vast city to be valued only for what it gives, but for itsown wonderful self, an obvious point which need not be expanded into atedious circle. The shy will naturally draw more advantage from so richa field of contemplation than those who seldom walk alone. In London Ioften map out a course of wandering which in its varied stages shallremind me of the change in progress or decay of particular arts orindustries or different quarters of the town. Reading their meaning inthe light of history, I make bare walls speak to me with a personalvoice. Let any one but acquaint himself with the styles ofecclesiastical or domestic architecture, or of monuments of the dead, orwith the history of the thoroughfares he frequents, and he will bepleasantly constrained to reflection upon those who have gone beforehim. As he stands in the shadow of an ancient church he will think tohimself: "By this very wall Chaucer may have stood. " As he walks amidthe reverberating ravines which are city streets he will say: "Herealong green and silent paths the Roman legionary marched when Hadrianruled the world. " When once the faculty of observation has been awakenedto a permanent alertness, the desire to be widely read in history of menand their arts will become irresistible; and through the knowledgegradually amassed it will be thought a sorry chance if any ramble ofwider compass yield no vision which in comeliness or deformity tells itstale of changing fortune. To appreciate human work, and the conditionsunder which it is born, is to exult in abounding sympathy with thisman's conquest over things poor in promise, or to condole with thatman's failure to do the best that in him lay. 

As I walk by the strand of Thames, my fancy sees upon one flood the gaybarge gliding upward to green fields, and the black hull bearing downthe prisoner to the Traitors' Gate. If I go up Holborn, I remember thatwhere this traffic now thunders John Gerard tended his Physic Gardenwhen Elizabeth was queen. I know where Sarah Siddons lived; and whereWilliam Blake died; and my curious wanderings are now so far extended, that when I turn to the great book of London I seldom find a tediouspage. The places where people strove and suffered evoke before me theforms of men and women dead but unforgotten, and if I am alone I am notaware of loneliness. 

London is the central wonder, but wonderful also in spirit andsuggestion are those old places which ring it round: these I oftenfrequent at every season, and carry their portraits over my heart. Let aman once learn to know them, and his memory shall never starve; he willnever forget the hour when first they yielded him up their secret. Manymoments of intimate delight do I treasure in remembrance, moments when Iwas suddenly aware that all previous impressions were the poorgatherings of purblind eyes; but I will only tell you of one, which maysuffice to show what riches lie ever open to those who roam in solitude. 

It was mid-April and the close of a cloudless day. I had been to theObservatory hill at Greenwich to see the sun set over London, lookingfor such a transfiguration of the grey city as should reveal its line ofwarehouses lying along the horizon in a mist of splendour like the wallsof the New Jerusalem. So I had seen it before, marvellous and refined inunearthly fire: but to-day, in a sadder mood, and hungering more deeplyfor the vision, I looked out to the west in vain. For the wind had setin from the east, and driven back upon the town a zone of iron-greysmoke, ragged along its upper edge like a great water blown to spray, but merging below with those gloomy and innumerable buildings. Upon thisthe sun, which all day had ridden in a clear air, was slowly falling, losing radiance with every minute, until as it approached that gloomyspray it was luminous no more, but a dull red orb whose light, like aflame withdrawn into the consumed heart of coals, glows for awhilebeneath a gathering film of grey. In a few minutes it descended, as ifsadly and of resolution, into the murky sea, where for a moment its redcurves seemed to refine the smoke into translucency; but at last thedun waves gathered upon it dark and voluminous, drowning it so deeplythat the clearer sky above was instantly robbed of the wontedafter-glow. Some pale reflection there was in the upper heaven, ensuringa time of twilight, but no glory; and smitten with a congruous sadness, I went down to the river. But there, pacing to and fro as if upon aquarter-deck, with the water lapping upon the wall beneath, I lived oneof the happy hours of life, redeemed from disappointment, and carriedfar into a magical world. 

The flood tide, which had turned for more than an hour, was now racingdown wilful for the sea, though the breeze ruffling its surface seemedto thwart and stay its eager course. And on the surface, indeed, chafedand broken into innumerable ripples, the wind triumphed; but as onelooked westwards towards the city, it was clear that the sullen strengthof stream and tide had the mastery. For over the broad curving reach, lit like white unburnished silver with the reflection of the pallid sky, there glided forward a line of barges each with every red sail set, andas silent as if they sallied from a besieged city. One by one they hungout their lights, the lamps swaying and casting yellow bars over thequivering water, until in perfect silence all passed down before me. Each in turn attaining the lower bend where the river sweeps northward, went about and stood for the Middlesex shore; and then for a moment thewind seemed to overcome the tide, for before the boat could win new way, lying almost broadside across the stream, the breeze held hermotionless, like a tired bird on a windy day when it flies out from theshelter of the wood. It was but for a moment, and then the blunt bowsglided forward towards the north bank, and another barge succeeded inthe gathering gloom. 

And so it was until all were passed. The departing light drew thecolours from the red sails and the silvery brightness from the river;all forms became outlined in black upon what uncertain light remained. Two men put off in a boat from an anchored ship; the mingled sound oftheir oars and voices came with subdued tone as if out of an infinitedistance. Then the whole reach lay bare and silent for a while, and onlythe little waves lapping upon the stone steps played an accompaniment tomy dream. 

The hour and the place compelled to reverie, and memory consenting totheir evocative charm, I peopled the still scene with the forms of thosewho had swayed or shared the fortunes of this land; imperious Elizabethand gentler Mary, the slight heroic figure with one sleeve pinned emptyon the breast, and all those who, going down to their business in deepwaters or returning therefrom, have saluted with melancholy or with joythese towers and this wooded hill. I thought of the lads playing beneaththese trees, and so inbreathing the spirit of this place that for themthere was no career but to follow the river down to ocean, and oceanhimself in his circuit of the world. I thought of the veterans returnedfrom that quest, old Argonauts of a later day, now clustering round theHospital fires and perhaps recalling amid tales of havens and high seasthe very morning when they first dropped round the bend and passed intothe new world beyond. For this Thames is such an avenue and entry intomarvellous life that earth can show no greater rival, none more rich indignity or in the multitude of its merchandise. And if the flood of thatmerchandise shall cease, and the stream once more go lonely to the seaor carry coracles, it cannot be again as if it had never borne greatships, or swung the Admiral's galley on its tide. 

It is good for an Englishman to stand here and listen to the brownwaters lapping on the old walls and caulked timbers; to hear, as anunder murmur, voices of Lechlade and Bablockhythe, for all interveningleagues of wood and meadow not altogether lost: before this persistenceand continuity of youth to feel high thoughts stir within him andsolemnize the nativity of new resolve. You cannot feel beneath your feetthese old stones trodden by the great generations of your own blood andkindred, and not be moved to walk uprightly, to be approved by theirshades as one not unworthy of such descent. For whether such wornstones be in the aisle of some great minster, or here, paving thisnarrow way for hurrying feet, the inspiration is as strong and thethankfulness not other. For this is a place of meridian, the navel ofour land and empire; the wind searching its alleys has no usual voice, but as it were a deep and oceanic sound, according with old ballads andstories of the sea. 

I lingered leaning upon the rail until the tide had fallen from thewall, tracing along the narrow pebbled foreshore a clear marginal lineof irregular contour, now sinuous, now straight, but palely luminouslike a silver tone on some enamel of old Italy, a line drawn by a masterdraughtsman, in its inevitable and sure perfection wholly satisfying theeye. With the dark bank it vanished towards the great city, now markedin the upper sky by a hovering brightness of light escaped beyond thesmoky rampart to tell the effort of innumerable lamps beneath, allpouring their blurred and vain effulgence to the disdainful stars. 

Moreover, the city will give the shy man all the consolations of art, philosophy and literature of which his education or experience may havemade him worthy. He can see great pictures or read great books at littlecost, and find in them the truest of friends in need. It is so obviousthat a solitary of any culture will find relief with such companions, that here I take for granted his resort to their aid, and will onlymention two resources from which the real recluse often draws lessadvantage than he might, I mean orchestral music and the drama. Any manof feeling who hears a great symphony ceases to be self-centred with thefirst movement; he goes out of himself, and rides upon waves of sound, exalted by this majesty of collective effort. No other music thrills hiswhole being like this, which sweeps him with all around into the verycourse of changing fates. In the confluence of dim hopes and passionswhich rise above the harmonies like smoke-wreaths riding the red flame, the soul glows interfluous with other souls and is elated with theinspiration of their presence. He bears arms exulting who never hadcomrades till now; his will is absorbed in confederate joy and humanforce unanimous. In this abandonment of the whole being, the diffidentknow their fellows near, and in the ecstasy of shared emotion learn thefull measure of their humanity. Philosophers in all ages have known andtaught the power of music in compelling ten thousand to the love of one, and so ennobling an infinite multitude in the glow of a common emotion. Sound was the first instinctive language, one for man and winds andwaters; and music, which is the development of this primeval converse, leaving to grammars the expression of cold and abstract thought, hasgathered about her in her mountain caverns the echoes of all sighs sador passionate, of all inarticulate cries born of aspiration or desire, and there blended them into eternal harmonies which at her word flowforth and join the hearts of men. 

Indeed, that swift responsiveness of feeling which music thus awakes isa gift beyond gems of Golconda; not youth's swift effusion cheaply givenand soon forgotten, but the vibration of a heart stirred in sympathywith some profound note of life, as the dyed pane stirs and quiverswhen the organ gives forth its deepest tones. Sentiment is a draught ofold wine passing into the veins and enriching the blood, until in thegenerous glow all the privations and the stints of loneliness areforgotten. Pure emotion is like righteous anger, which may be lawfullyindulged if the sun go not down upon it; and as he who shrinks from allfire of wrath lives but a vaporous life, so he who will never be movedis proud of a poor crustacean strength, like the limpet, winningdarkness in exchange for dull stability. As for me, in the propitioushour when the heart longs for expansion, I give it honourable licence, and quicken its unfolding by spells of magical words. At such times Iinvoke the aid of passionate souls, not shrinking even from the vain, provided that they loved greatly and give great expression to theirhumanity. Such is that wild lover of George Sand whose _Souvenir_, forall its rhetoric, charms like an incantation. The ancients quenched theashes of the pyre with red wine, as if the blood of the god-given vinecould hearten the spirit that yet hovered near. Over my ashes let nowine be poured, but read me such verses high and valiant, that if mysoul yet lingers undelivered from the earth's attraction it may beregenerated and set free into a braver life. 

And let the lonely man be an assiduous frequenter of the playhouse, forthe drama will also open the world's heart to him, and that by a plainerand less elusive speech. Seated in the theatre among his kind, he knowsa deeper pleasure than other men; for while to these the changing scenebrings remembrance or anticipation of familiar things, to him it revealswhole vistas of life which, except in dreams, his feet may never tread. When the curtain is rung down, and he goes out into the street, for awhile at least his existence is transformed. All those front doorsaligned in their innumerable sequence, which in daylight or darkness hepasses when he wanders alone, are now no longer barred against him; theyopen at the touch of his fancy, and he sees within the light ofhomeliness, where father, mother, and child weave round warm firesidestheir close conspiracies of affection. At last he knows what is passingbehind those bars; like an old family friend he takes his place by thefire and receives as of right the confidences which in his real lonelylife never find their way to his ears. He helps the lovers to buildtheir cloudy castles, he reasons away the parents' care, he goesup-stairs with a shaded candle to look in upon the children sleeping. Good women unlock the jewel-caskets which are their souls; happy maidensare sisterly with him; strong men grapple him to their hearts and callhim friend. He that was vagabond has now innumerable homes, and of thefaces that fleet by him out of doors there are always some which seem togive him greeting. 

These secret and unavowed alliances transfigure the unlovely streets, and light in the cavernous blank houses many a glowing and familiarhearth. As he goes on, careless of distance or direction, he is nowinwardly busy with fresh and delightful dreams. He plights his troth andearth is Eden; he imagines brilliant hours for the dream-children whogo by his side, holding each of his hands. And if the visions change, and sorrow or sin pass in over a familiar threshold, what generousabnegation, what pity, what righteous wrath does he not know, until theplastic power of fancy moulds out of this poor recluse a man like othermen. Amid these visionary sympathies time goes quickly by, and returningto his voiceless dwelling he has stored up such wealth of dreams that hecan even endure the supreme test when the lonely man finds himselfsitting in the wan light with no one near him to whom he is dear. Of thestrength and peacefulness which bring him safely through that hour ofdesolation he owes much to the players, who have shot the drab textureof life with an infinity of bright and tender hues, so that he can bearto turn it in his hands and look upon it with a wistful pleasure. I say, then, let the shy man frequent the playhouse, and there facet andburnish his dulled mind until it reflects, if it may not touch, themany-sided world. 

For the discipline of sympathy, for the quickened sense of comradeshipin work, for the very presence of that unloveliness which compelssympathy, I dwell more months in the town than in the country-side. Butremembering what Nature did to save me, and owing her an endless debt offilial duty, I return to her in the summer days, and to make up for thelong months of separation cling nearer to her than most of her truantsons. For communion with Nature, the ideal joy of country life, is notattained by the sportsman or the mere player of games, who think oftheir bodies chiefly, and use as a means to rude physical vigour the endordained for the fine contentience of body, mind, and spirit. Again Iwill pass by the obvious and familiar resources of outdoor life, andspeak only of such as men are unaccountably prone to neglect. 

There is a way of learning nature which in this wet land is mostlyfollowed by tramps and vagrants; the way of sleeping beneath the stars. So far is this joy from the thoughts of most men, that even GeorgeBorrow felt a strange uneasiness when for the first time the darknessdescended upon him in the open country. I think we carry with us all ourlives that fear of night with which nursery tales inspired ourchildhood; it reinforces the later more reasoned fear of boisterousweather, or of the men who walk in darkness because their works areevil. We shrink from night as a chill privation of daylight, as a gloomwhich we must traverse, but not inhabit; the distrust becomes with yearsinstinctive and universal, and the nearest approach to friendly relationwith night attained by most of us is a timid liking for the twilighthours. Yet as the sun rises alike upon the just and upon the unjust evenso does he descend, and we put a slight upon Providence if we abandon torogues and rakes that wonderful kingdom of the darkness of which bynatural prerogative we are enfranchised. By never using our properfreedom, we give them prescriptive licence of usurpation, so that thehours in which the heavens are nearest to us are become the peculiarinheritance of thieves. 

I confess that on the night when first I set out to do without a bedroomI too felt all the force of the traditional mistrust. I heard humanwhispers in the wind, and saw the shadows of walls and trees as forms ofmen lurking to spring out against me. The movements of roosting birdsstartled me as I passed; the sudden silences startled me more. And whenI had spread my gear on the ground and settled down to rest, the senseof exposure on every side made sleep impossible; time after time Iseemed to hear footsteps stealthily approaching; and there was astrangeness pervading everything which to my nervous fancy was simplyprovocative of apparitions. This lasted many nights; and whether Iestablished myself on the edge of a copse, or in the open grass, or in ahammock beneath two trees, I continued a prey to the same uneasywakefulness. But then, as if satisfied of good faith by suchperseverance, the night began to wear a friendly aspect, the shadowsgave up their ghosts, and the breezes became the expected messengers ofslumber. 

When the lonely sleeper-out has grown familiar with the moonlight andthe darkness, he is admitted into the number of earth's favoured sons;for lying like a child upon her bosom, he hears her heart beating in thesilence, and wakes to see her smiling in her beauty like a queenapparelled. To no man slumber comes more gently than to him; and hisuprising is as that of a child exulting in the cloudless day. Health andinnocence return to him, and his one sorrow is that he has lived intomaturity without continually partaking of these sane and naturaldelights. Remorse is his that for all these years he has feared the dewsand shrunk from the bland night airs; and remembering the needlessimprisonment of a hundred chambers, he mourns over the irrecoverablehours which would have rooted his life more deeply in tranquillity andstrength. But the June sun is up, and the birds are singing: he strideswith light step over the grass, watching the rabbits play in the glades, and in unison with a host of fellow-creatures singing a welcome to thedawn. When it is time for him to think of home and he comes once morebeneath a doorway, he has a mind refreshed by the quietude of dim space, and a heart replenished with innocence and good-will. He who so sleepshates no man, and will go upon the dullest way free from petulance ordespair. The scent of the rich earth is in his nostrils, and theclearness of morning air has passed into his eyes. 

I have made my lair in many places since I first kept house with Nature. I have couched in heather by the pines of hills far above the SussexWeald; I have lain in dry furrows or on the margin of a copse, or in theparks of the children of fortune, for whose welfare, in gratitude fortheir unconscious hospitality, I shall ever pray. But of all wildresting-places I have known, the openest are the most delightful. To seethe whole sweep of the stars; to lie on the shorn ground free of allthat overshadows or encompasses or confines; to breathe in the greatgulf of air; to stretch unhindered limbs--this is an initiation into anew life, a pleasant memory in the long glooms of winter. Let nothingcome between you and the stars, that they may look well upon your face, and haply repenting of some ancient unkindliness, draw you at thisrebirth a new horoscope of blessing and fair fortune. And if slumbertarries when you lie in an open spot, you may consciously ride the greatglobe through space, and like the shepherd watching by his flock in theclear night while star rises after star, grow aware of the great earthrolling to the east beneath you. 

In these still hours of night or early dawn there steals upon thecharmed mind an Orphic sense of worship and inexplicable joy. For hereon bare uplands and wooded hills, where the starlight rains down throughthe silence, or the day, welling up over the rim of the downs, glidesfresh from the lips of ocean, a calm river of light, here is the placeof Dionysus, of him born from fire and dew, Zagreus the soul of cleansouls and wild lives, his heart a-quiver with vague sadness drawn fromall the worlds, Eleutherios, loosener of heart and lip, the regenerator, the absolver, the eternally misunderstood, whose true followers arepriests of impassioned pure life, whose wine is not juice of grapes butthe clear air ambient upon the hills. Here when sleep is shamed away byexpectant awe, the whole being grows one with all-environing life;personality glides into the stream of cosmic existence, lost and found athousand times in the trance and ecstasy of dim divine feelings beyondthe power of words inexpressible. It is miracle; it is religion; it is afeast of purification above pomps or mysteries, a cleansing ritualwithout victims and undefiled. In such hours, and in such hours alone, man and things are joined in a supreme utterance of life high andhumble, transient and immortal, by which the fellowship of allexistences within the universe is made real and significant to theinitiate mind. For in the day fences are about us, roofs and towersimpend above our heads, we are cribbed in streets and markets, the dinof rhetoric or sordid bargaining fills our ears. Or if we withdraw intosome still chamber, yet the walls built by hired hands offend, and thedoorposts of sapless timber; no high influence can penetrate to us savethrough the close court of memory, and compared with the breezy starlitmeadows, how poor an avenue to the soul is that!

And the exuberant sun of noon distracts, and the multitude of his beamsis troublous, for what does sight avail if the things of the heart'sdesire are lost in immeasurable perplexities of light? For in the highday the quivering bright air is more opaque than the dim spaces ofnight, so tranquil and severe, or the glowing kingdoms of the morning. At the springing of the day the eyes open upon awakening flowers, givingfilial heed to the marvellous earth which waits in patience for a humangreeting. I like the passage in which Chaucer tells how in May-time hiscouch was spread in an arbour upon the margin of the grass, that hemight wake to see the daisies unfold their petals. Sleeping thus, healso must have known those intervals of slumber when a sense of someimpending wonder grows too strong for sleep, and all nature seemscalling to high vision. Often I have been thus awakened, not by noiseor movement, but as it were by some strange prescience of beautyconstraining me to rise and look. Once I was drawn some distance roundthe corner of a copse, and there, low in the sable-blue of the sky, in arivalry of intense but dazzling light, the crescent moon hung splendidover against a great constellation which glittered like a carcanet ofdiamonds. They seemed to speak together as if in some scene or passageof celestial drama, nor did I know which was the diviner speech, themoon's unwavering effulgence or that leaping coruscation of the stars. Nothing stirred on the right hand or the left, but earth and air werehushed, as if before that colloquy all sound and motion weremiraculously holden. Tall trees brown with densest shadows were massedupon one side, obscuring half the heaven, and lending by theircontrasted gloom that sense of wizardry in natural things which enchantsthe clear summer nights when the air is still. 

This is but one among many visions of which the remembrance makes lifeworshipful; and it is pity that at the hour of their coming well-nighall whom they should delight lie chambered within brick walls, lost insleep or in the mazes of unprofitable thoughts. For these things intheir rare appearances are more precious than an hour's slumber, were itdreamless as a child's, or all the watches of luxurious unrest. Ifanother summer is given me I hope to take the road when July has comewith balmy nights, and wander days at a stretch with all I need upon myshoulders. Then I shall know the real joy of vagrancy, caring littlewhere night finds me, and quickening my steps for nothing and for noman. I shall linger in every glade or on every hill-top which calls tome to stay; I shall tell all the hedgerow flowers, and lean over thegates to watch the foals playing. The brooks shall be my washing-basins, and I shall quench hunger and thirst in the tiled kitchens of lonelyfarmsteads. If I hear the shriek of a train I shall smile when I thinkof its cooped and harried passengers, and plunge devious into somepathless wood, in whose depths the only sounds are the tap of thewoodpecker's bill or the measured axe-strokes of the woodman. I shallfling myself down to rest under what tree I will, and pulling from mypocket the book of my choice, I shall summon a wise and cheerfulcompanion to my side as easily as ever oriental magician called a jinnto do him service. I shall once more be commensal with wild creatures, and wonder that solitude was ever a pain; I shall be healthilydisdainful of the valetudinarian who lives to spoil either his body orhis soul. 

These are the wanderings which henceforward will chiefly suffice to myneed. For since I roamed my fill in other continents the gadfly may nolonger sting me out of my tranquil haunts. In their youth lonely peoplesuffer more than others from that restlessness which fills the mind withsudden distaste for the present scene, and a fierce longing to besomewhere far away. Others are preserved from it by the love of home;but we, in our poverty of attachment, listen more readily to thedepreciating voice. 

I remember how deep had always been my longing to look out upon the seafrom some Greek island, and how one day, when this desire was granted, and I walked along hills set high above the blue Ægean, I was seizedwith an instant yearning to be instead upon Ranmore Common in Surrey. Yet at that moment a life's ambition was being fulfilled; I stood in ascene of incomparable beauty, gazing down on those deep azure waterswhose voice is always to me as a lament for wandering Odysseus; thelower slopes were rich with olive trees, powdering with silver thetilled lands round a beautiful monastery lying there in its enchantedrest. Dark cypresses rose amid white walls of villages, by the contrastof their gloom making all bright colours glorious; away to the left, where the shore verged westward tracing inimitable curves between fieldand sea, lay slumbering a little white town with minarets and walledgardens and tiny haven--a very place for Argonauts; and yet my thoughtsturned to the chalk downs of England and honeysuckle crowning theunfruitful hollies. _Sed quia semper abest quod aves praesentiatemnis_;--Such desire has distracted Roman minds; the perversity is veryold; and perhaps only children find no disillusion in the accomplishmentof a dream. 

For our feet have one country and our dreams another, and there is noconstancy in us. It is not alone in the bartering of one earthly scenefor its fellow that we suffer the sick thirst of change; but into therarest hour of achieved ideal to which hope promised her supremesatisfaction, the same wayward longing will often find a way; as in asacred place amid the purest and most exquisite meditations of the soul, there will suddenly flit inexplicable shadows of irreverence, withechoes of incongruous voices from the abandoned world. 

But now as the years pass and the penury of human love has made the homewoods and fields more dear, I feel that this unrest is drawing to itsend. For as the seasons pass over the uplands and the meadows, clothingthem with new splendours between the seed-time and the harvest, novision rises upon the memory dearer and more beneficent than theirs. Asthe lover's fancy dwells upon the image of his beloved in this or thatenvironment, and thus or thus arrayed, so I see the woods and fields inthe various glories of the year and know not in which garb I love thembest. They have heard my laments, my confidences, all my brokenresolves: they are bound to me by so pure and intimate an affection thatall those grander wonders of the world should never draw me again fromthis allegiance. Not for the vision of Himalaya piercing the heaven, orthe sunsets of Sienna, or the moonlight on the Taj Mahal, or for anyother beauty or any wonder shall I weary of the cornfields framed inelms or the great horses turning in the furrow against the evening sky. 

For with the growth of years our desires wander less, and are mercifullycontracted to the scope of our wearying powers. We haunt the same oldplaces and want the same old things, dwelling amongst them with anincreasing constancy of devotion. For we find that year by year the oldplaces and things are not really the same; something has touched them inour absence; strange still agencies have intervened, long silences ofdissolution and the ineluctable fate of change. And so that perfectsameness which we find unattainable takes on the quality of ideal anddemands the grown man's devotion, as the change that is forbidden castsits resistless spell over the guarded and tethered child. The eyes ofyouth are on the far end of the vista, those of age upon the near; theold horse that has drawn the coulter through the clay is glad for thefour hedges of the paddock which irk the growing colt's desire. WhenRichard Jefferies was asked why he walked the same lane day after day, at first he was at a loss for a reply; but gradually the reason becameclear to him. It was because he had become aware of the iron law:_Nothing twice_: he wanted the same old and loved things not twice butendlessly; he was yearly more eager to be with them, and paint indeliblyupon his memory their delicate quiet beauty, their soft and perishablecharm. 

That is how I also feel, as with the return of summer I wander out intothe old meadows and climb the familiar hills; I find myself hoping thatnothing is changed, and am stirred with sweet anxieties of reminiscence. And surely within the enchanted boundaries of the counties where Iramble, there is variety which not the hundred eyes of Argus couldexhaust. These fields and woodlands in high summer feast all the senseswith a surfeit of delights. How good it is to exercise in all its rangethe fine mechanism of the body, suffering each part of it to indulge itsown hunger after beauty; to feel the texture of petals, and draw thelong grasses through the fingers; to breathe an air laden with the scentof blossoms, passing from uplands fragrant with bean-flowers intountilled regions odorous with pines; to hear the birds' chorus atsunrise and the distant sound of reaping; to see innumerable marvels;the belts of clover mantling wine-dark in the wind; the poppies in thestanding corn, the carmine yew-stems on the downs; above you the softgrey clouds delicately floating; below you, as the day declines, somedistant lonely water emerging in its glory to be the mirror and refugeof all heaven's light; to remember the gorse and broom and look forwardto the royal purple of the heather--all this is a consummation of purelife, a high, sensuous pleasure penetrating to the inmost soul, and ofsuch exceeding price that to disdain its offerings or to pass incuriousbefore them, is to live in the blindness of the tribe of Genseric. 

In such wanderings the mind is filled with slow and seasonable thoughts, lasting as the trees and buildings of the country-side. Old deliberatecontemplations, perceptions after long regard ingathered from abundantnature, theories leisurely compacted in sunshine or storm, to stand inthe fields of memory, crowned with beauty by the indulgent years. So inthe visible meadows stand the ancient barns, with roofs of umber tilesparcel-gilded with old gold of lichen, and crowning their seasonedtimbers "as naturally as leaves"; restful structures of a quiet age, capacious of dim space, unvexed by the glare of a hundred summers. 

And if you ask what profit is here for one who must do battle in theloud world, study for a while the artifice and industrious policy ofplants by which they attract to themselves the visitants they need orwith most masterful defence repel the importunate advance, and you willreturn to the societies of men, even to their parliaments, enriched witharts of prudence beyond the practice of Machiavel. Examine the dog-roseupon the hedge, how by putting forth thorns it raises itself to thelight and ranges irresistible along the leafy parapets; see how theflowers adapt their form and colour to the convenience of the bee or thepredilections of the bird; consider the furze armed with spines againstbrowsing muzzles, and be near when it casts its seed wide upon theearth; and then say if among states or governments there is a wisereconomy or an intelligence more provident of its end. I myself have theconceit that if time, revoking my sentence of superannuation, shouldrestore my lost years and add youth to the wisdom learned along thehedges, even I, a very profitless weed, should not again so uncivillydecay, but flower to another June and see my seed multiply around me. 

Perhaps, if that might be, I should strive to learn thoroughly, andbring science to bear upon experience. But, as I am, classifications anddissections are repellent to my fancy. I cannot get to the hearts offlowers by any Linnæan approach, but go rather by the old animistic way, still honoured by Milton through his Genius of the Woods:

 "When evening gray doth rise I fetch my round, Over the mount and all this hallowed ground, And early, ere the breath of odorous morn Awakes the slumbering leaves. "

So I greet the blossoms of hill and upland and water-meadow, knowingthem all by their country names, and sometimes fancying that they knowme back: all that is lacking is the tutelary power to guard their growthand prolong their bright and fragrant lives. What fine old names theyhave, great with the blended dignities of literary and rural lore;archangel, tormentil, rosa solis or sun-dew, horehound, Saracen'swound-wort, melilot or king's clover, pellitory of Spain! I cannotcoldly divide so fine a company into bare genera and species, butimagine for them high genealogies and alliances by an imaginative methodof my own: to me the lily and the onion shall never be connections. 

If I must read books on flowers, I take down such a one as NicholasCulpeper's _Complete Herbal_, written from "my house in Spitalfieldsnext the Red Lion, September 5th, 1653. " For here is a man who attempersscience with the quaintest fancies after the manner of his generation, and delightfully misinterprets the real affinity of the flowers and theheavens. "He that would know the operation of the herbs must look up tothe stars astrologically, " says this master; and so to him briony is "afurious martial plant, " and brank ursine "an excellent plant under thedominion of the moon. " Of rosemary he says, "the sun claims privilege init, and it is under the celestial ram, " and of viper's bugloss, "it isa most gallant herb of the sun. " The bay-tree rouses him to realeloquence, though not for Apollo's sake. "It is a tree of the sun andunder the celestial sign of Leo, and resists witchcraft very potently, as also all the evils that old Saturn can do to the body of man; forneither witch nor devil, thunder nor lightning will hurt a man in theplace where a bay-tree is. "

Reading in this old book of the ordinance and virtues of the familiarherbs, I escape from the severities of botanical science into a maze ofqueer fancies, well suited to those retrospective hours when we lovebest what we least believe. And by the pleasant suggestion of astrologyI am led on to contemplate the starry heavens, which I do in the ancientpastoral way, peopling them with mythical forms and connecting them withthe seasonable changes of rustic toil. I forget for the moment all thediscoveries of Copernicus and Kepler, and see eye to eye withCleostratus of Tenedos who nightly watched the stars from the sacredslopes of Ida. 

Much as the companionships of nature have meant for me, I would not haveany man content himself with these alone. It is not right to live theslave of Pales, or become the rhapsode of docks and nettles. To be allfor the lower life, were it the fairest, is derogation; and Har and Hevabefore they may enter into their kingdom of the flowers must first befallen spirits. But continually in the interludes of human endeavour torebathe the mind at these clear wells does indeed exceedingly purify andstrengthen against the returning and imminent encounter. Those longretreats at Walden may not often be repeated, for man is either risentoo high or too far fallen to live well in the sole company of animalsand flowers. What sociologists call the consciousness of kind is asvital to man as the consciousness of self; and to pine for adoption intoan alien kind is vain on this side transmigration. 

Not seldom my wanderings in town and country lead me to quietchurchyards, or to those vast cemeteries where the living haveestablished the dead in avenues and streets of tombs after their drearsuburban fashion. Solitude has ever persuaded to the contemplation ofdeath, and in these silent places I feel no shock of sadness but amrather possessed by a familiar spirit of peace. As I wander from path topath, my fancy is not lamed by mournful thoughts, but finds suggestionamid the poor laconic histories by which these headstones appeal to himthat passes by. 

It is with most men a natural desire to take their last rest in somegreen God's acre, far from the smoke and turmoil of towns, lying in afair space amid a small company, where there is a wide prospect oftilled lands, and the reapers cut the swathes against the verychurchyard wall. And this is my most usual aspiration; yet there aretimes when I would not shrink in thought from the Valley of Ezekiel, andwould be content to be written a mere number in some city of the dead, where at last after all the loneliness of life I should no longer bekept apart, but be gathered to my fellows where they lie in theirthousands, and be received a member of their society. And though I wellknow that it matters not a cummin-seed whether my bones are washed toand fro on the bed of the sea or my ashes cast to the winds of heaven, yet I humour this fancy, and find a quiet pleasure in the thought thatdeath at least may end this isolation. 

And what if the propinquity of these poor remains be gage and promise ofa sympathy of souls unveiled and unhidden by false semblances of thebody? Then should death indeed be the crown of a long desire and give meat the last the fellowship into which life denied initiation. Surely, asColeridge dreamed, there is a sex in souls, which, disengaged from thecoarse companionship of the flesh, shall see into each other's crystaldeeps. Thence, in new life, when the last recondite secret is withholdenno longer, there shall come forth those qualities and powers thatennobled man and woman in mortality; they shall come forth in all theirseveral strength and beauty, divinely animate, and reflecting upon eachother bright rays and soft colours invisible upon these misty oceans ofour navigation. 

It is not terrible to think, at times, on death, for that _dansemacabre_ which troubled the fancy of our forefathers is now danced out, and the silent figure that knocks at every door comes not as a grinningskeleton but as one of more gentle countenance than any art can express. The natural change, which to William Blake was but the passing out ofone room into another, is well personified in the merciful figure withthe kind eyes, coming at the sounded hour to lead away into quietness. My solitude has taught me to know well those noble efforts which art hasmade to lift from our bowed backs the burden of the fear of death: Ilike to look upon that youthful Thanatos carved upon a column from thetemple of the Ephesian Diana, and every year the red leaves of autumnpersuade my steps to that village rich in elms where lived one who alsosaw death so, and laboured to draw the frightened eyes of men from thehour-glass and the skull to the gracious vision of the deliverer andfriend. There hands which were dear to him have raised a place ofleave-taking upon a green slope, a house of farewell set upon the shoreto receive the last pledges from the living to the absolved andunburdened dead. 

When first I saw Compton it was a cloudless noon in August, the day ofdays in which to come alone into this silent place. Out of the fieryheat beaten from wall and path like a blinding spray of light, it is apassage into a dimness of cool space, an air glaucous as the shade ofolives. There from the circuit of a dome look down kind faces ofimmortal youth, in form and habit too tranquil for our life, but madehomely to us by the mercy in their eyes, and some quality of the whitesoft hands which draws all weariness and all pain towards them. To me itwas as though some furious struggle in the waves were over, and swooningout of life I had awakened upon a floor of translucent ocean, where, ina gracious and tempered light, beings of a compassion too intense forearth, each with a gesture that was not yet a touch, were charming allthe bruises of the lost battle away. Surely this is true vision ofthings to come, and to such mercy we shall awaken. It cannot be thatwhen the eyes reopen they shall see the forms of dark apparitors, orthat the ears shall hear Æacus and Rhadamanthys speaking in dim hallstheir cold, irrevocable dooms. No, but there shall be a pause andrespite upon the way from one to another life, and none may be conceivedmore grateful than this rest, as it were a sojourn beneath waters ofEunoë, where a flood of dear memories foreboding good shall absolve usfrom the mortal sin of fear. 

 * * * * *

Turning back over these pages, I am conscious that I have failed to givereal experiences their proper life. Describing solitude I have beendull; I have fixed the rushing flames of emotion in poor flamboyantlines. I have written far more than any reader but yourself will havecared to follow; but now at any rate the confession is over, and in thefuture I shall work, and use my sight for a worthier end thanintrospection. It has been said that the tale of any life isinteresting if sincerely told; and it may be that the most ordinarylives have the advantage, because it is the common experience whichtouches most hearts. For the greater part mine has been a common life, unglorified by hazards in the field, or bright fulfilment of ambition;it had been better for its peace if it might wholly have kept thecomfortable, usual way. 

I sometimes wonder whether the printing of these pages will reveal to meany kinsmen in affliction, for such there must be going westward alone, and I wish that for a moment we might foregather as we pass, to comparethe marvels of our isolation. Then perhaps I might be urged to highereffort, hearing stories more pitiful than mine, tales of silent courageunder ban of excommunion to shame me from the very thought of despair. Poets have metaphorically given colours to souls; mine, I feel, is onlygrey, the common hue of shadows; but it was steeped in gloom by averitable pain and evils really undergone. And as I reflect upon what Ihave written, and try to imagine it read by some brisk person utterlycontent with life, I can well understand that the whole thing wouldappear to him incredible, too preposterously strange for belief, arigmarole of sick fancies beyond the power of hellebore. So be it: Iexpect small comprehension and no mercy, for indeed I have writtencaring little for such consequence, yielding to that human thirst forutterance which only confession can slake; as one eases pain by a moanthough there are none to hear it. It is not altogether a grateful task. For hardly, and then only in a fortunate hour, to one whose years andfeelings have been interwoven with his own, will even a healthy man tellthe tale of his hidden emotion; and mine is the deeper reticence of ahabit which has ever held closely to the recipe of fernseed. To entrusta confidence to one of unproven sympathy, is to risk a profitlessembarrassment. It has been most truly said that both parties to suchimpulsive avowals, whenever they afterwards meet, must feel a constraintas of confederacy in misdemeanour. 

I have hope that though I came late to the steady labour of thevineyard, I may yet earn my wage and begin the new day with the rest. Like Joseph Poorgrass I can now almost regard my diffidence as aninteresting study, and agree with the rustic man of calamities thatdestiny might have made things even worse. Certainly the pain grows lessfierce; I can go more readily among my fellows for all but social ends. For those who live much apart learn at last to see men not asindividuals but in groups: to them it is the type which counts, the_forma specifica per formam individualem translucens_, of which thescholastic jargon speaks. Those with whom I come in casual contactappear to me now in a vague, diffused light like the atmosphere of someother world. Dwelling upon none with the eyes of intimacy, and passingswiftly from this to that, I find each but the harmless variant of aspecies; if I lingered or came too near, doubtless old apprehensionswould oppress me still. It is a disadvantage of this outlook that thefascination of detail is lost, and that I have less sense for thepersonal in life. But if I grow old I shall regain the interest inparticular things and persons with which age is consoled amid manymiseries; for while youth grows earnest over some riddle of high art orthe occultation of Aldebaran, age is happily absorbed in the arrangementof a room or discussing the destinies of a single household. 

Meanwhile, though uncongenial to my kind as entering little into theirpleasures, I like to be near them in their grief or happiness, standingunnoticed in the wind of their fortune's wheel. At least I am not souredor malevolent, and when there is dancing toward, I am in the crowd uponthe margin of the green. I have abandoned social obligations because Iam unfitted to perform them well, and society high and low exists bytheir cheerful fulfilment. But I no longer rail at social law or declineto see anything but evil in conventions devised by the wisdom andrefinement of centuries. If I refuse invitations and leave calls unpaid, it is because I am socially bankrupt: were I solvent I should redeem alldebts. 

I decline therefore to denounce Chesterfield and deify Thoreau: therewas exaggeration in both men, and though my sympathies are rather withthe recluse of Walden pond, it is quite probable that Chesterfield wasthe more useful of the two. I am a bad player, I have not the highspirits or the conversational skill which each should contribute to thesocial game. And in almost any sport the incompetent confer a benefit bystanding out: at least, that is the opinion which I hear the averageplayer express. If I lived in the backwoods where any guest is welcome, it might be my duty to act differently. But my ways are cast in placeswhere there is no need for social press-gangs, and the highways andhedges are left unsearched. If therefore by abstention I gain aqualified peace for myself, and confer positive benefit on others, I maygo my way without serious reproach. 

And I did wisely not to marry, for I should have clung too closely to mystudy for the happiness of any woman. I once saw an advertisement inthe newspaper inserted by a discontented young wife whose husband was arecluse and would not take her out of evenings. She wanted tocommunicate with congenial people, and, like a desperate sailormarooned, was driven to wave her signal in the sight of the casual eye. This frank confession of abandonment made a profound impression upon me. I thought to myself, "Master recluse, you are a pilferer and havefilched a life. I am yet more solitary in my estate, and if I followedyour example, should be guilty of a greater wrong. " There are, indeed, hours when I feel embittered at the thought that for one innocent defecta whole life should be amerced of joy; the finality of loss appals: allis so irrevocable; _le vase est imbibé, l'étoffe a pris son pli_. Avoided not without cause by those who were my natural associates, Igrow impenetrable of access, and even in my own family unfamiliar. Theresentment that welled up in the man who told the story of HenryRyecroft obtains the mastery, and I feel one in spirit with that lonelyanalyst of disillusions. Sometimes a worse darkness gathers round, tillI long for one of those intense and all-absorbing creeds which somehowseem to tend the brightest hearth-fires which earth knows: forphilosophy, though it invented the void, never built a little Gidding. 

It is then that I feel like the suppliant of the old Babylonian prayer, "one whose kin are afar off, whose city is distant, " and all thatappears before my sight is one scroll of wrongs which this evil heritagehas inflicted upon me. It has made my best years rich in misery; it hascut me off from marriage; it has compelled me, one hating vaincomplaint, to live querulously in the optative mood. Neither poverty norsickness could chastise more heavily; for poverty is strong in numbersand sickness rich in sympathy, but diffidence reaps laughter and isalone. When such thoughts win dominion over the mind I could envy whatsufferer you will his most awful punishment. For in his agony be surethere is movement and action; his limbs are torn, yet he is draggedonward: by his very writhing in the bonds he confesses his life. But Ilie in some dead waste where nothing moves and all is mist withouthorizon, lost in an abhorred blankness of dismay to which no positivesuffering may be likened. Thither comes no fierce provocation to quickeninto Promethean scorn; life lies whelmed in blackness unlit by flashesof defiance or the cold splendour of disdain. 

Empedocles once described his dream of retribution for the lastunutterable offence. For thrice ten thousand years the sinner roamsestranged from bliss, taking all mortal shapes, wearing with tired feetall the sad ways of life. Æther sweeps him out to Ocean, Ocean casts himnaked on the shores of Earth, Earth hurls him upward to the flames ofHelios, and he, relentless, spurns the victim back to Æther, that thedread cycle may begin anew. But to be for ever driven in this majesticwhirl of change, to receive the chastisement of all elements and surviveunbroken for a new revolution of the wheel, this is but an assurance ofthe very pride of life, it is the charter of an invincible manhood. Thedoom which in truth befits the unutterable sin is rather the blank painwithout accident or period, without point or salience to draw fromstunned nature her last energies of resentment. It is well for me thatthis misery is short-lived, and that either by thinking on that ideallove I know the miracle of the twenty-ninth sonnet, or, struggling withinstant effort out of the toils, try to see myself as I appear toothers, one who should scorn to sit in thirst when there are wells yetfor the seeking. 

It is a strange life to lead in this pleasureful world; and if when itis over I were condemned to live again, coming like Er the Armenian tothat meadow where the lots are thrown down for each to choose his own, Iam already decided what character I should elect to play. I shouldneither cast myself for a protagonist's part nor again for that of adumb actor in those backgrounds I know too well; but just for a plainmanly character, strong to face all fortunes and rich in troops offriends. There should be no more evasion or dreary wrestling of mindwith body; but life should move to a restrained harmony, and no elusivewind should carry half the music away. 

As for what remains of this present dispensation, I shall know how toendure, trusting that the years may fade finely, like the figures in anold tapestry, and that the end may come to me as to the old gentleman inHans Christian Andersen's story of the Old House. And I have thisadvantage over other men, that while they have the whole cornucopia tolose, I can but be deprived of the dregs in its pointed end. For in whatcan there be further punishment? On others, men of happy pasts, dismaymay fall as the ways are darkened before them. But surely I shall be ofgood cheer as I come into the land of the fierce old robber Age; for, stripped long since by a more subtle and insatiate despoiler, I shallpossess nothing of worth to draw his covetousness upon me. So many joysdid my very youth renounce; so many pleasures the Harpies swept from myplace at the spread board of life; such gags and fetters held me whileothers danced and sang, that I was the sad familiar of evil fortunebefore my companions were acquainted with her name. That leaden weightwhich brings others low, by a nice adjustment of the scales shall raiseme for the first time to their equality. And then, as one experienced inbereavements, of themselves they may seek my company; and I, so long theuseless and estranged, may become at the close their helpful counsellor. 

If only that might be; if only upon the verge of night I might redeem byusefulness my lost unserviceable day. Then this grey life, so long soleand intrinsical to itself, should glow at last with some reflection ofthe sunset; once more I should know young ardours imagined lost anddevotions miraculously born again. 

You will still encounter me now and then, moving absently through thecrowd, or wandering in some green place, as in the garden of theLuxembourg Vauvenargues used to meet the wounded of the great battle, keeping apart in the narrower walks, and leaving the broad central waysfor lighter feet than theirs. He often longed to have speech with them;but always they turned away, with the proud self-sufficiency of thedisillusioned. Perhaps if he had succeeded he would have found that tosome of them life had its consolations not unlike mine, and that theycould still regard it as something more than a friendly process ofdetachment. But it is not our habit to expand; we are ever held back bythe occult pride which the same soldier-philosopher has assigned to oneof his imaginary characters, "cette fierté tendre d'une âme timide, quine veut avouer ni sa défaite, ni ses espérances, ni la vanité de sesvoeux. "