-absorbed. Who does not remember friends of college
days, graceful and winning creatures, lost in the sense of their own
significance, who had nothing, it may be, particular to say, no great
intellectual grip, no suggestiveness, yet moving about in a mysterious
paradise of their own, full of dumb emotion, undefined longing, and
with a deep sense of the romantic possibilities of life. Alas, as the
days move on and the crisis delays, as life brings the need of labour,
the necessity of earning money, as love and friendship lose their rosy
glow and settle down into comfortable relations, the disillusionment
spreads and widens. I do not say that the nearer view of life is not
more just, more wholesome, more manly. It is but the working of some
strictly determined law. The dreams fade, become unreal and
unsubstantial; though not rarely, in some glimpse of retrospect, the
pilgrim turns, ascends a hillock by the road, and sees the far-off
lines, the quiet folds, of the blue heights from which he descended in
the blithe air of the morning, and knows that they were desirable.
Perhaps the happiest of all are those who, as the weary day advances,
can catch a sight of some no less beautiful hills ahead of him, their
hollows full of misty gold, where the long journey may end; and then,
however wearily the sun falls on the dusty road and the hedged fields
to left and right, he knows that the secrets of the earlier day are
beautiful secrets still, and that the fine wonder of youth has yet to
be satisfied. And yet the shadow does undoubtedly fall heavily on the
way for me and for such as me, whose one hope is that before they die
they may make some delicate thing of beauty and delight which may
remind those that come after that the first beauty of opening light and
the song of the awakening bird is a real and true thing, not a mere
effect of air and sun and buoyant spirit. Experience and fact and hard
truth have a beauty of their own, no doubt. Politics and commerce, the
growth of social liberty and law, civic duty and responsibility--dull
words for noble things--have their place, their value, their
significance. But to the poet they seem only the laborious organising
of his dreams, the slow and clumsy manufacture of what ought to be
instinctive and natural. If the world must grow upon these lines, if
men must toil in smoke-stained factories or wrangle in heated
Parliaments, then it is well that the framework of life should be made
as fi