e quick passing of the enthusiasms
of opening life, as one cause after another, one hero, one poet,
disclosing the great interests of life, in turn engages his heart. As
time goes on, and life comes out in its true perspective, one thing with
another, and he discovers the incompleteness of single elements of
ardour in the whole of life, and also the defects of wisdom, art, and
action in those books and men that had won his full confidence and what
he called perfect allegiance, there comes often a moment of pause, as if
this growth had in it some thing irrational and derogatory. The thinkers
whose words of light and leading were the precious truth itself, the
poets he idolized, the elders he trusted, fall away, and others stand in
their places, who better appeal to his older mind, his finer impulses,
his sounder judgment; and what true validity can these last have in the
end? After a decade he can almost see his youth as something dead, his
early manhood as something that will die. The poet, especially, who
gives expression to himself, and puts his life at its period into a
book, feels, as each work drops from his hand, that it is a portion of a
self that is dead, though it was life in the making; and so with the
embodiments of life in action, the man looks back on past greatness,
past romance; for all life, working itself out--desire into
achievement--dies to the man. Vital life lies always before. It is a
strange thought that only by the death of what we now are, can we enter
into our own hopes and victories; that it is by the slaying of the self
which now is that the higher self takes life; that it is through such
self-destruction that we live. The intermediate state seems a waste, and
the knowledge that it is intermediate seems to impair its value; but
this is the way ordained by which we must live, and such is life's magic
that in each stage, from childhood to age, it is lived with trustfulness
in itself. It is needful only, however much we outlive, to live more and
better, and through all to remain true to the high causes, the faithful
loves, the sacred impulses, that have given our imperfect life of the
past whatever of nobility it may have; so shall death forever open into
life. But," I ended, lifting my moist eyes toward the sweep of the dark
slopes, "the wind blows, and leaves the mystic to inquire whence and
whither, the wild shrub blossoms and only the poet is troubled to excuse
its beauty, and happy is he who