seemed to me I felt the
first chill shadow of that same arrest, that impalpable ebb and
cessation at the very crest of things, that voice which opposes to all
the hasty ambitions and gathering eagerness of men: "It is not here, it
is not yet."

Only the other day as I came back from Paris to this quiet place and
walked across the fields from the railway station to this house, I saw
an old woman, a grandmother, a bent old crone with two children playing
about her as she cut grass by the wayside, and she cut it, except that
her sickle was steel, exactly as old women were cutting grass before
there was writing, before the dawn of history, before men laid the first
stones one upon the other of the first city that ever became a ruin....

You see Civilization has never yet existed, it has only continually and
obstinately attempted to be. Our Civilization is but the indistinct
twilight before the dawn. It is still only a confused attempt, a
flourish out of barbarism, and the normal life of men, the toiling
earthy life of the field and the byre, goes on still like a stream that
at once supports and carries to destruction the experimental ships of
some still imperfect inventor. India gives it all from first to last,
and now the modern movement, the latest half-conscious struggle of the
New Thing in mankind, throws up Bombay and Calcutta, vast feverish
pustules upon the face of the peninsula, bridges the sacred rivers with
hideous iron lattice-work and smears the sky of the dusty ruin-girdled
city of Delhi,--each ruin is the vestige of an empire,--with the black
smoke of factory chimneys.

Altogether scattered over that sun-burnt plain there are the remains of
five or six extinguished Delhis, that played their dramas of frustration
before the Delhi of the Great Mogul. This present phase of human
living--its symbol at Delhi is now, I suppose, a scaffold-bristling pile
of neo-Georgian building--is the latest of the constructive synthetic
efforts to make a newer and fuller life for mankind. Who dares call it
the last? I question myself constantly whether this life we live to-day,
whether that too, is more than a trial of these blind constructive
forces, more universal perhaps, more powerful perhaps than any
predecessor but still a trial, to litter the world with rusting material
when the phase of recession recurs.

But yet I can never quite think that is so. This time, surely, it is
different. This time may indeed be the beginn