usions.

He never mocks our pain with foolish, unfounded hopes and he
never permits mad despair to paralyse him. He takes life as it is, and,
as we all have to do, makes the best of its confusions. If we are here
"as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle and
flight, where ignorant armies clash by night," we can at least be
"true to one another."

One wonders sometimes if it be properly understood by energetic
teachers of youth that there is only one intellectual attitude towards
life, only one philosophy, only one ultimate mood. This is that mood
of "resignation," which, from Homer to Matthew Arnold, is alone
adapted, in the long run, to the taste of our days upon earth.

The real elements of our situation have not altered in the remotest
degree since Achilles dragged Hector round the walls of Troy.

Men and women still love and hate; still "enjoy the sun" and "live
light in the Spring"; still "advance true friends and beat back
dangerous foes"--and upon them the same Constellations look down;
and upon them the same winds blow; and upon them the same
Sphinx glides through the obscurity, with the same insoluble
Question.

Nothing has really changed. The "river of time" may pass through
various landscapes, but it is the same river, and, at the last, it brings
to us, as "the banks fade dimmer away" and "the stars come out"
"murmurs and scents" of the same infinite Sea. Yes, there is only
one Philosophy, as Disraeli said, jesting; and Matthew Arnold,
among the moderns, is the one who has been allowed to put it into
his poetry. For though, before the "Flamantia Moenia" of the world's
triple brass, we are fain to bow our heads inconsolably, there come
those moments when, a hand laid in ours, we think we know "the
hills whence our life flows"!

The flowing of the river of life--the washing of the waves of
life--how well one recalls, from Arnold's broken and not always musical
stanzas, references to that sound--to the sound so like the sound of
those real sea-tides that "Sophocles, long ago, heard in the
Aegaean," and listened, thinking of many things, as we listen and
think of many things today!

"For we are all like swimmers in the Sea,
Poised on the top of a huge wave of Fate,
And whether it will lift us to the land
Or whether it will bear us out to Sea,
Back out to Sea, to the dark gulfs of Death,
We know not--
Only the event will teach us, in its hour."