n; and as a man
abandoned by the last illusion of deliverance calls ruin to him, and in
the new leisure of despair calmly scans the features at which but now he
dared not glance, so I saw as in a hard grey light the true outlines of
my destiny. The wreathing mist, the profound soft shadows, the clouds
with their promise of mutability, were now all gone, leaving the bare
framework 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 may
crouch abandoned, while the caravan in which all his earthly hopes are
centred goes inexorably upon its way. The blue sky flushes to deep
purple before him; night falls; all colour is swallowed up in darkness,
until the jingling camel-bells receding up the pass cross the dividing
ridge, and for him the last silence is begun. Such then was the end of
youthful ambition: for food a mouthful of ashes instead of the very
marrow of joy; for home not the free ocean, but a stagnant pool ringed
with weeping willows, a log's fit floating-place. Here to float, marking
the weed creep onward until all from bank to bank was overfilmed, and
there remained no clear water of space for reflection of a single star:
to float, and feel the sodden fibres of life loosening in slow
decay--this was to be the last state of the seedling which had sprung up
on the mountain slopes with promise of mighty stem and overarching
branches full of sap like the cedars of the Lord.

My life henceforth was to be ringed round and overhung with so heavy an
air that joy and fancy should never fly in it, but fall dead as the
birds above Avernus according to the ancient story. I seemed to see
nothing upon the path of the future but the stern form of Renunciation
drawing between me and the living world the impassable circle of death
in life, the _ultima linea rerum_. It was the last decree, the
irrevocable sentence, the absolute end: and I had not yet reached half
the Psalmist's span; I had not yet forgotten the lost summer mornings
when 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 of
dragging the soul down to the mire in which it wallows. They forget that
by its brutal insistence upon physical needs it often preserves from
madness, and timely arrests him who goes like a sleep-walker upon the
verge of the abyss. Weariness and