m, and least pain, to the poet or the
artist when men are hidden away under their roofs. Then they do not
break its calm with either their mirth or their brutality; then the vile
and revolting coarseness of their works, that blot it with so much
deformity, is softened and obscured in the purple breaths of shadow, and
the dim tender gleam of stars.

* * *

When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to treasure its
recollections; even to pause and look back; to see what flower of a fair
thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or left
down-trodden. But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind, and
heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest and
can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many
that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and
suffocated under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow
to be moved, and swift--terribly swift--to forget.

Why should it not be?

It has known the best, it has known the worst that ever can befall it.

And the prayer that to the heart of man seems so freshly born from his
own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same old,
old cry which it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound of
the wind, and for ever--for ever--unanswered?

* * *

For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith;--the Faith, whatever
its name may be, that draws a man on all his years through on one narrow
path, by one tremulous light, and then at the last, with a laugh--drowns
him.

* * *

I think I see!--the great God walked by the edge of the river, and he
mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should be a joy on the earth
for ever; and he passed by the lily white as snow, by the thyme that fed
the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by the orange flame of
the tall sandrush, by all the great water-blossoms which the sun kissed
and the swallows loved, and he came to the one little reed pierced with
the snake's-tongues, and all alone amidst millions. Then he took it up,
and cut it to the root, and killed it; killed it as a reed--but breathed
into it a song audible and beautiful to all the ears of men. Was that
death to the reed?--or life? Would a thousand summers of life by the
waterside have been worth that one thrill of song when a god first spoke
through it?

* *