the variety of grotesque vehicles that go to
compose a luggage train, or the grass-grown, scarped, water-logged
excavations of a brick-field, as in the sharp rock-horns of some craggy
mountain, impulsive as a frozen flame, or the soft outlines of fleecy
clouds that race over a sapphire heaven. If one is thus endowed by
nature, it seems such an easy thing to seclude oneself from life, and
to find endless joy in sight and hearing and critical appreciation.
Instead of mingling with the throng, marching and fighting, fearing and
suffering, it seems easy to stand apart and let nature and art and life
unfold itself before one in a rich panorama. But not on such terms can
life be lived. One hopes to avoid suffering by aloofness; but there
falls upon the spirit a worse sickness than the weariness of toil--the
ache of pent-up activities and self-tortured mystifications. The soul
becomes involved in a dreary metaphysic, wondering fruitlessly what it
is that mars the sweet and beautiful world. The fact is that one is
purloining experience instead of paying the natural price for it,
estimating things by the outside instead of from the inside, and
growing thus to care more for the strangeness, the contrast, the
picturesqueness of it all, than for the love and the hope and the
elemental forces, of which the world is but the garb and scene.

Here in this book the mind turns from itself and its rest, when it has
satisfied its first delight in creating the home, the setting, the
scenery, so to speak, of the drama; turns to the men and women who
cross the stage, surveys their gestures and glances, interprets their
movements and silences; and then winds out into the further distance,
the towns, the buildings, the roads, that stand for the designs and
desires of pilgrims that have passed into the unknown country, leaving
their provender for later hands to use. But the whole book, if I may
say it, is the prelude to the further scene, the silent entry of Fate,
the coming of the Master to survey the servant's work.

Those pleasant days have a savour of their own for this one
reason--that they were not spent in a mere drifting indolence or a
luxurious abandonment. They were deliberately planned, intently lived,
carefully employed; behind the pleasures lay a great tract of solid
work, very diligently pursued. That was to have been the backbone of
the whole; and it is for this that I have no sense of regret or
contrition about it. It was an ex