ust of an impotent activity; it is better to hear one or two
notes sung in the overshadowing trees than to spend one's years amid a
murmur in which nothing is distinctly audible. Theocritus, shunning
courts and cities, sought to assuage the pain of life at the heart of
Nature, and did not seek in vain. He gave himself calmly and sincerely
to the sweet and natural life which surrounded him, and in his tranquil
self-surrender he gained, unsuspecting, the immortality denied his
eager and restless cotemporaries [Transcriber's note: contemporaries?].
Life is so vast, so unspeakably rich, that to have reported accurately
one swift glimpse, or to have preserved the melody of one rarely heard
note, is to have mastered a part of the secret of the Immortals.

Struggle and anguish have their place in every genuine life, but they
are the stages through which it advances to a strength which is full of
repose. The bursting of the calyx announces the flower; but the beauty
of the perfect blossoming obliterated the very memory of its earlier
growth. The climb upward is often a long anguish, but the dust and
weariness are forgotten when once the eye rests on the vast outlook.
"On every height there lies repose" is the sublime declaration of one
who had looked into most things deeper than his fellows, and had
learned much of the profounder processes of life. Emerson long ago
noted that even in action the forms of the Greek heroes are always in
repose; the crudity of passion, the distorting agony of half-mastered
purpose, are lost in a self-forgetfulness which borrows from Olympus
something of the repose of the gods. The sublime calm which imparts to
great works of art a hint of eternity is born of complete mastery of
life; all the stages of evolution have been accomplished, the whole
movement of growth has been fulfilled, before the hand of art sets the
seal of perfection on the thing that is done. Shadow and light, heat
and cold, tempest and quiet days, have all wrought together before the
blooming of the flower which in its perfect grace and beauty gives no
hint of its troubled growth. As the consummation of all toil and
struggle and anguish, there comes at last that deep repose, born not of
idleness and indifference, but of the harmony of all the elements in
their last and finest form.

In the unbroken silence of the noon-tide such thoughts come unbidden
and almost unnoticed to one who surrenders himself to the hour and the
s