rrace for my
sublime Statue; the landscape of palaces and triumphal arches for the
background of my Portrait; stairs of marble, flung against the sunset,
not too narrow and ignoble for me to pause with ample gesture on their
balustraded flights?

THE RATIONALIST

Occultisms, incantations, glimpses of the Beyond, intimations from
another world--all kinds of supernaturalisms are distasteful to me; I
cling to the known world of common sense and explicable phenomena; and I
was much put out to find, this morning, a cabbalistic inscription
written in letters of large menace on my bath-room floor. TAM HTAB--what
could be the meaning of these cryptic words, and how on earth had they
got there? Like Belshazzar, my eyes were troubled by this writing, and
my knees smote one against the other; till majestic Reason, deigning to
look downward from her contemplation of eternal causes, spelt backwards
for me, with a pitying smile, the homely, harmless inscription on the
BATH MAT, which was lying there wrong side up.

THOUGHTS

One Autumn, a number of years ago--I forget the exact date, but it was a
considerable time before the War--I spent a few weeks in Venice in
lodgings that looked out on an old Venetian garden. At the end of the
garden there was a rustic temple, and on its pediment stood some naked,
decayed, gesticulating statues--heathen gods and goddesses I vaguely
thought them--and above, among the yellowing trees, I could see the
belfry of a small convent--a convent of Nuns vowed to contemplation, who
were immured there for life, and never went outside the convent walls.

The belfry was so near that when, towards dusk, the convent bell began
to ring against the sky, I could see its bell-rope and clapper moving;
and sometimes, as I sat there at my window, I would think about the
mysterious existence, so near me, of those life-renouncing virgins.

Very clearly it comes back to me, the look of that untidy garden, of
those gesticulating statues, and of that convent bell swinging against
the sky; but the thoughts that I thought about those Nuns I have
completely forgotten. They were probably not of any especial interest.

PHRASES

Is there, after all, any solace like the solace and consolation of
Language? When I am disconcerted by the unpleasing aspects of existence,
when for me, as for Hamlet, this fair creation turns to dust and
stubble, it is not in Metaphysics nor in Religion that I seek
reassu