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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Trivia
+
+Author: Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+
+Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8544]
+This file was first posted on July 21, 2003
+Last Updated: May 13, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRIVIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joris Van Dael, Charles Aldarondo, Charles
+Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TRIVIA
+
+
+By Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+_Bibliographical Note_
+
+
+Some of these pieces were privately printed at the Chiswick
+Press in 1902. Others have appeared in the "New Statesman" and
+"The New Republic," and are here reprinted with the Editors'
+permission.
+
+
+
+
+_Preface_
+
+
+"You must beware of thinking too much about Style," said my
+kindly adviser, "or you will become like those fastidious people
+who polish and polish until there is nothing left."
+
+"Then there really are such people?" I asked, lost in the thought
+of how much I should like to meet them. But the well-informed
+lady could give me no precise information about them.
+
+I often hear of them in this tantalizing manner, and perhaps one
+day I shall get to know them. They sound delightful.
+
+
+
+
+_The Author_
+
+
+These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a
+large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the
+Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked
+Gorilla, the Baboon with his bright blue and scarlet bottom, and
+the long-eared Chimpanzee.
+
+
+
+
+_List of Contents_
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+    Preface
+
+    The Author
+
+    Happiness
+
+    To-day
+
+    The Afternoon Post
+
+    The Busy Bees
+
+    The Wheat
+
+    The Coming of Fate
+
+    My Speech
+
+    Stonehenge
+
+    The Stars
+
+    Silvia Doria
+
+    Bligh House
+
+    In Church
+
+    Parsons
+
+    The Sound of a Voice
+
+    What Happens
+
+    A Precaution
+
+    The Great Work
+
+    My Mission
+
+    The Birds
+
+    High Life
+
+    Empty Shells
+
+    Dissatisfaction
+
+    A Fancy
+
+    They
+
+    In the Pulpit
+
+    Human Ends
+
+    Lord Arden
+
+    The Starry Heaven
+
+    My Map
+
+    The Snob
+
+    Companions
+
+    Edification
+
+    The Rose
+
+    The Vicar of Lynch
+
+    Tu Quoque Fontium
+
+    The Spider
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+    L'Oiseau Bleu
+
+    At the Bank
+
+    Mammon
+
+    I See the World
+
+    Social Success Apotheosis
+
+    The Spring in London
+
+    Fashion Plates
+
+    Mental Vice
+
+    The Organ of Life
+
+    Humiliation
+
+    Green Ivory
+
+    In the Park
+
+    The Correct
+
+    "Where Do I Come In?"
+
+    Microbes
+
+    The Quest
+
+    The Kaleidoscope
+
+    Oxford Street
+
+    Beauty
+
+    The Power of Words
+
+    Self-Analysis
+
+    The Voice of the World
+
+    And Anyhow
+
+    Drawbacks
+
+    Talk
+
+    The Church of England
+
+    Misgiving
+
+    Sanctuaries
+
+    Symptoms
+
+    Shadowed
+
+    The Incredible
+
+    Terror
+
+    Pathos
+
+    Inconstancy
+
+    The Poplar
+
+    On the Doorstep Old Clothes
+
+    Youth
+
+    Consolation
+
+    Sir Eustace Carr
+
+    The Lord Mayor
+
+    The Burden
+
+    Under an Umbrella
+
+
+
+
+TRIVIA
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+_How blest my lot, in these sweet fields assign'd Where Peace
+and Leisure soothe the tuneful mind._
+
+SCOTT, of Amwell, _Moral Eclogues_ (1773)
+
+
+
+
+_Happiness_
+
+
+Cricketers on village greens, haymakers in the evening sunshine,
+small boats that sail before the wind--all these create in me
+the illusion of Happiness, as if a land of cloudless pleasure, a
+piece of the old Golden World, were hidden, not (as poets have
+imagined), in far seas or beyond inaccessible mountains, but
+here close at hand, if one could find it, in some undiscovered
+valley. Certain grassy lanes seem to lead between the meadows
+thither; the wild pigeons talk of it behind the woods.
+
+
+
+
+_To-Day_
+
+
+I woke this morning out of dreams into what we call Reality,
+into the daylight, the furniture of my familiar bedroom--in fact
+into the well-known, often-discussed, but, to my mind, as yet
+unexplained Universe.
+
+Then I, who came out of Eternity and seem to be on my way
+thither, got up and spent the day as I usually spend it. I read,
+I pottered, I talked, and took exercise; and I sat punctually
+down to eat the cooked meals that appeared at stated intervals.
+
+
+
+
+_The Afternoon Post_
+
+
+The village Post Office, with its clock and letter-box, its
+postmistress lost in tales of love-lorn Dukes and coroneted woe,
+and the sallow-faced grocer watching from his window opposite,
+is the scene of a daily crisis in my life, when every afternoon
+I walk there through the country lanes and ask that well-read
+young lady for my letters. I always expect good news and
+cheques; and then, of course, there is the magical Fortune which
+is coming, and word of it may reach me any day. What it is, this
+strange Felicity, or whence it shall come, I have no notion; but
+I hurry down in the morning to find the news on the breakfast
+table, open telegrams in delighted panic, and say to myself
+"Here it is!" when at night I hear wheels approaching along the
+road. So, happy in the hope of Happiness, and not greatly
+concerned with any other interest or ambition, I live on in my
+quiet, ordered house; and so I shall live perhaps until the end.
+Is it, indeed, merely the last great summons and revelation for
+which I am waiting? I do not know.
+
+
+
+
+_The Busy Bees_
+
+
+Sitting for hours idle in the shade of an apple tree, near
+the garden-hives, and under the aerial thoroughfares of those
+honey-merchants--sometimes when the noonday heat is loud with
+their minute industry, or when they fall in crowds out of the
+late sun to their night-long labours-I have sought instruction
+from the Bees, and tried to appropriate to myself the old
+industrious lesson.
+
+And yet, hang it all, who by rights should be the teachers and
+who the learners? For those peevish, over-toiled, utilitarian
+insects, was there no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of
+Me? Gazing out at me with myriad eyes from their joyless
+factories, might they not learn at last--might I not finally
+teach them--a wiser and more generous-hearted way to improve the
+shining hour?
+
+
+
+
+_The Wheat_
+
+
+The Vicar, whom I met once or twice in my walks about the
+fields, told me that he was glad that I was taking an interest
+in farming. Only my feeling about wheat, he said, puzzled him.
+
+Now the feeling in regard to wheat which I had not been able to
+make clear to the Vicar was simply one of amazement. Walking one
+day into a field that I had watched yellowing beyond the trees,
+I found myself dazzled by the glow and great expanse of gold. I
+bathed myself in the intense yellow under the intense blue sky;
+how dim it made the oak trees and copses and all the rest of the
+English landscape seem! I had not remembered the glory of the
+Wheat; nor imagined in my reading that in a country so far from
+the Sun there could be anything so rich, so prodigal, so
+reckless, as this opulence of ruddy gold, bursting out from the
+cracked earth as from some fiery vein below. I remembered how
+for thousands of years Wheat had been the staple of wealth, the
+hoarded wealth of famous cities and empires; I thought of the
+processes of corn-growing, the white oxen ploughing, the great
+barns, the winnowing fans, the mills with the splash of their
+wheels, or arms slow-turning in the wind; of cornfields at
+harvest-time, with shocks and sheaves in the glow of sunset, or
+under the sickle moon; what beauty it brought into the northern
+landscape, the antique, passionate, Biblical beauty of the
+South!
+
+
+
+
+_The Coming of Fate_
+
+
+When I seek out the sources of my thoughts, I find they had
+their beginning in fragile Chance; were born of little moments
+that shine for me curiously in the past. Slight the impulse that
+made me take this turning at the crossroads, trivial and
+fortuitous the meeting, and light as gossamer the thread
+that first knit me to my friend. These are full of wonder;
+more mysterious are the moments that must have brushed me
+with their wings and passed me by: when Fate beckoned and I
+did not see it, when new Life trembled for a second on the
+threshold; but the word was not spoken, the hand was not
+held out, and the Might-have-been shivered and vanished, dim
+as a into the waste realms of non-existence.
+
+So I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm
+of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents. Why,
+to-day, perhaps, or next week, I may hear a voice, and, packing
+up my Gladstone bag, follow it to the ends of the world.
+
+
+
+
+_My Speech_
+
+
+"Ladies and Gentlemen," I began--The Vicar was in the chair;
+Mrs. La Mountain and her daughters sat facing us; and in the
+little schoolroom, with its maps and large Scripture prints,
+its blackboard with the day's sums still visible on it, were
+assembled the labourers of the village, the old family coachman
+and his wife, the one-eyed postman, and the gardeners and
+boys from the Hall. Having culled from the newspapers a few
+phrases, I had composed a speech which I delivered with a
+spirit and eloquence surprising even to myself, and which was
+now enthusiastically received. The Vicar cried "Hear, Hear!",
+the Vicar's wife pounded her umbrella with such emphasis, and
+the villagers cheered so heartily, that my heart was warmed. I
+began to feel the meaning of my own words; I beamed on the
+audience, felt that they were all brothers, all wished well
+to the Republic; and it seemed to me an occasion to express
+my real ideas and hopes for the Commonwealth.
+
+Brushing therefore to one side, and indeed quite forgetting my
+safe principles, I began to refashion and new-model the State.
+Most existing institutions were soon abolished; and then, on
+their ruins, I proceeded to build up the bright walls and
+palaces of the City within me--the City I had read of in Plato.
+With enthusiasm, and, I flatter myself, with eloquence, I
+described it all--the Warriors, that race of golden youth bred
+from the State-ordered embraces of the brave and fair; those
+philosophic Guardians, who, being ever accustomed to the highest
+and most extensive views, and thence contracting an habitual
+greatness, possessed the truest fortitude, looking down indeed
+with a kind of disregard on human life and death. And then,
+declaring that the pattern of this City was laid up in Heaven, I
+sat down, amid the cheers of the uncomprehending little
+audience.
+
+And afterward, in my rides about the country, when I saw on
+walls and the doors of barns, among advertisements of sales, or
+regulations about birds' eggs or the movements of swine, little
+weather-beaten, old-looking notices on which it was stated that
+I would "address the meeting," I remembered how the walls and
+towers of the City I had built up in that little schoolroom had
+shone with no heavenly light in the eyes of the Vicar's party.
+
+
+
+
+_Stonehenge_
+
+
+They sit there forever on the dim horizon of my mind, that
+Stonehenge circle of elderly disapproving Faces--Faces of the
+Uncles and Schoolmasters and Tutors who frowned on my youth.
+
+In the bright centre and sunlight I leap, I caper, I dance my
+dance; but when I look up, I see they are not deceived. For
+nothing ever placates them, nothing ever moves to a look of
+approval that ring of bleak and contemptuous Faces.
+
+
+
+
+_The Stars_
+
+
+Battling my way homeward one dark night against the wind and
+rain, a sudden gust, stronger than the others, drove me back
+into the shelter of a tree. But soon the Western sky broke open;
+the illumination of the Stars poured down from behind the
+dispersing clouds.
+
+I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they filled the
+night with their soft lustre. So I went my way accompanied by
+them; Arcturus followed me, and becoming entangled in a leafy
+tree, shone by glimpses, and then emerged triumphant, Lord of
+the Western sky. Moving along the road in the silence of my own
+footsteps, my thoughts were among the Constellations. I was one
+of the Princes of the starry Universe; in me also there was
+something that was not insignificant and mean and of no account.
+
+
+
+
+_Silvia Doria_
+
+
+Beyond the blue hills, within riding distance, there is a
+country of parks and beeches, with views of the far-off sea. I
+remember in one of my rides coming on the place which was the
+scene of the pretty, old-fashioned story of Silvia Doria.
+Through the gates, with fine gate-posts, on which heraldic
+beasts, fierce and fastidious, were upholding coroneted shields,
+I could see, at the end of the avenue, the façade of the House,
+with its stone pilasters, and its balustrade on the steep roof.
+
+More than one hundred years ago, in that Park, with its
+Italianized house, and level gardens adorned with statues and
+garden temples, there lived, they say, an old Lord with his two
+handsome sons. The old Lord had never ceased mourning for his
+Lady, though she had died a good many years before; there were
+no neighbours he visited, and few strangers came inside the
+great Park walls. One day in Spring, however, just when the
+apple trees had burst into blossom, the gilded gates were thrown
+open, and a London chariot with prancing horses drove up the
+Avenue. And in the chariot, smiling and gay, and indeed very
+beautiful in her dress of yellow silk, and her great Spanish hat
+with drooping feathers, sat Silvia Doria, come on a visit to her
+cousin, the old Lord.
+
+It was her father who had sent her--that he might be more free,
+some said, to pursue his own wicked courses--while others
+declared that he intended her to marry the old Lord's eldest
+son.
+
+In any case, Silvia Doria came like the Spring, like the
+sunlight, into the lonely place. Even the old Lord felt himself
+curiously happy when he heard her voice singing about the house;
+as for Henry and Francis, it was heaven for them just to walk by
+her side down the garden alleys.
+
+And Silvia Doria, though hitherto she had been but cold toward
+the London gallants who had courted her, found, little by
+little, that her heart was not untouched.
+
+But, in spite of her father, and her own girlish love of gold
+and rank, it was not for Henry that she cared, not for the old
+Lord, but for Francis, the younger son. Did Francis know of
+this? They were secretly lovers, the old scandal reported; and
+the scandal, it may be, had reached her father's ears.
+
+For one day a coach with foaming horses, and the wicked face of
+an old man at its window, galloped up the avenue; and soon
+afterwards, when the coach drove away, Silvia Doria was sitting
+by the old man's side, sobbing bitterly.
+
+And after she had gone, a long time, many of the old, last-century
+years, went by without any change. And then Henry, the eldest son,
+was killed in hunting; and the old Lord dying a few years later,
+the titles and the great house and all the land and gold came to
+Francis, the younger son. But after his father's death he was but
+seldom there; having, as it seemed, no love for the place, and
+living for the most part abroad and alone, for he never married.
+
+And again, many years went by. The trees grew taller and darker
+about the house; the yew hedges unclipt now, hung their branches
+over the moss-grown paths; ivy almost smothered the statues; and
+the plaster fell away in great patches from the discoloured
+garden temples.
+
+But at last one day a chariot drove up to the gates; a footman
+pulled at the crazy bell, telling the gate-keeper that his
+mistress wished to visit the Park. So the gates creaked open,
+the chariot glittered up the avenue to the deserted place; and a
+lady stepped out, went into the garden, and walked among its
+moss-grown paths and statues. As the chariot drove out again,
+"Tell your Lord," the lady said, smiling, to the lodge-keeper,
+"that Silvia Doria came back."
+
+
+
+
+_Bligh House_
+
+
+To the West, in riding past the walls of Bligh, I remembered an
+incident in the well-known siege of that house, during the Civil
+Wars: How, among Waller's invading Roundhead troops, there
+happened to be a young scholar, a poet and lover of the Muses,
+fighting for the cause, as he thought, of ancient Freedom, who,
+one day, when the siege was being more hotly urged, pressing
+forward and climbing a wall, suddenly found himself in a quiet
+old garden by the house. And here, for a time forgetting, as it
+would seem, the battle, and heedless of the bullets that now and
+then flew past him like peevish wasps, the young Officer stayed,
+gathering roses--old-fashioned damask roses, streaked with red
+and white--which, for the sake of a Court Beauty, there besieged
+with her father, he carried to the house; falling, however,
+struck by a chance bullet, or shot perhaps by one of his own
+party. A few of the young Officer's verses, written in the
+stilted fashion of the time, and almost unreadable now, have
+been preserved. The lady's portrait hangs in the white drawing
+room at Bligh; a simpering, faded figure, with ringlets and
+drop-pearls, and a dress of amber-coloured silk.
+
+
+
+
+_In Church_
+
+
+"For the Pen," said the Vicar; and in the sententious pause that
+followed, I felt that I would offer any gifts of gold to avert
+or postpone the solemn, inevitable, hackneyed, and yet, as it
+seemed to me, perfectly appalling statement that "the Pen is
+mightier than the Sword."
+
+
+
+
+_Parsons_
+
+
+All the same I like Parsons; they think nobly of the Universe,
+and believe in Souls and Eternal Happiness. And some of them, I
+am told, believe in Angels--that there are Angels who guide our
+footsteps, and flit to and fro unseen on errands in the air
+about us.
+
+
+
+
+_The Sound of a Voice_
+
+
+As the thoughtful Baronet talked, as his voice went on sounding
+in my ears, all the light of desire, and of the sun, faded from
+the Earth; I saw the vast landscape of the world dim, as in an
+eclipse; its populations eating their bread with tears, its rich
+men sitting listless in their palaces, and aged Kings crying
+"Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity!" lugubriously from their
+thrones.
+
+
+
+
+_What Happens_
+
+
+"Yes," said Sir Thomas, speaking of a modern novel, "it
+certainly does seem strange; but the novelist was right. Such
+things do happen."
+
+"But my dear Sir," I burst out, in the rudest manner, "think
+what life is--just think what really happens! Why people
+suddenly swell up and turn dark purple; they hang themselves on
+meat-hooks; they are drowned in horse-ponds, are run over by
+butchers' carts, and are burnt alive and cooked like mutton
+chops!"
+
+
+
+
+_A Precaution_
+
+
+The folio gave at length philosophic consolations for all
+the ills and misfortunes said by the author to be inseparable
+from human existence--Poverty, Shipwreck, Plague, Love-Deceptions,
+and Inundations. Against these antique Disasters I armed my soul;
+and I thought it as well to prepare myself against another
+inevitable ancient calamity called "Cornutation," or by other
+less learned names. How Philosophy taught that after all it was
+but a pain founded on conceit, a blow that hurt not; the reply
+of the Cynic philosopher to one who reproached him, "Is it my
+fault or hers?"; how Nevisanus advises the sufferer to ask
+himself if he have not offended; Jerome declares it impossible
+to prevent; how few or none are safe, and the inhabitants of
+some countries, especially parts of Africa, consider it the
+usual and natural thing; How Caesar, Pompey, Augustus, Agamemnon,
+Menelaus, Marcus Aurelius, and many other great Kings and Princes
+had all worn Actaeon's badge; and how Philip turned it to a jest,
+Pertinax the Emperor made no reckoning of it; Erasmus declared it
+was best winked at, there being no remedy but patience, _Dies
+dolorem minuit_; Time, Age must mend it; and how according to
+the best authorities, bars, bolts, oaken doors, and towers of
+brass, are all in vain. "She is a woman," as the old Pedant
+wrote to a fellow Philosopher....
+
+
+
+
+_The Great Work_
+
+
+Sitting, pen in hand, alone in the stillness of the library,
+with flies droning behind the sunny blinds, I considered in my
+thoughts what should be the subject of my great Work. Should I
+complain against the mutability of Fortune, and impugn Fate and
+the Constellations; or should I reprehend the never-satisfied
+heart of querulous Man, drawing elegant contrasts between the
+unsullied snow of mountains, the serene shining of stars, and
+our hot, feverish lives and foolish repinings? Or should I
+confine myself to denouncing contemporary Vices, crying "Fie!"
+on the Age with Hamlet, sternly unmasking its hypocrisies, and
+riddling through and through its comfortable Optimisms?
+
+Or with Job, should I question the Universe, and puzzle my sad
+brains about Life--the meaning of Life on this apple-shaped
+Planet?
+
+
+
+
+_My Mission_
+
+
+But when in modern books, reviews, and thoughtful magazines I
+read about the Needs of the Age, its Complex Questions, its
+Dismays, Doubts, and Spiritual Agonies, I feel an impulse to go
+out and comfort it, to still its cries, and speak earnest words
+of Consolation to it.
+
+
+
+
+_The Birds_
+
+
+But how can one toil at the great task with this hurry and
+tumult of birds just outside the open window? I hear the Thrush,
+and the Blackbird, that romantic liar; then the delicate
+cadence, the wiry descending scale of the Willow-wren, or the
+Blackcap's stave of mellow music. All these are familiar--but
+what is that unknown voice, that thrilling note? I hurry out;
+the voice flees and I follow; and when I return and sit down
+again to my task, the Yellowhammer trills his sleepy song in the
+noonday heat; the drone of the Greenfinch lulls me into dreamy
+meditations. Then suddenly from his tree-trunks and forest
+recesses comes the Green Woodpecker, and mocks at me an impudent
+voice full of liberty and laughter.
+
+Why should all the birds of the air conspire against me? My
+concern is with the sad Human Species, with lapsed and erroneous
+Humanity, not with that inconsiderate, wandering, feather-headed
+race.
+
+
+
+
+_High Life_
+
+
+Although that immense Country House was empty and for sale, and
+I had got an order to view it, I needed all my courage to walk
+through the lordly gates, and up the avenue, and then to ring
+the door-bell. And when I was ushered in, and the shutters were
+removed to let the daylight into those vast apartments, I
+sneaked through them, cursing the dishonest curiosity which had
+brought me into a place where I had no business. But I was
+treated with such deference, and so plainly regarded as a
+possible purchaser, that I soon began to believe in the opulence
+imputed to me. From all the novels describing the mysterious and
+glittering life of the Great which I had read (and I had read
+many), there came to me the enchanting vision of my own
+existence in this Palace. I filled the vast spaces with the
+shine of jewels and stir of voices; I saw a vision of ladies
+sweeping in their tiaras down the splendid stairs.
+
+But my Soul, in her swell of pride, soon outgrew these paltry
+limits, O no! Never could I box up and house and localize under
+that lowly roof the Magnificence and Ostentation of which I was
+capable.
+
+Then for one thing there was stabling for only forty horses; and
+of course, as I told them, this would never do.
+
+
+
+
+_Empty Shells_
+
+
+They lie like empty seashells on the shores of Time, the old
+worlds which the spirit of man once built for his habitation,
+and then abandoned. Those little earth-centred, heaven-encrusted
+universes of the Greeks and Hebrews seem quaint enough to us,
+who have formed, thought by thought from within, the immense
+modern Cosmos in which we live--the great Creation of granite,
+planned in such immeasurable proportions, and moved by so
+pitiless a mechanism, that it sometimes appals even its own
+creators. The rush of the great rotating Sun daunts us; to think
+to the distance of the fixed stars cracks our brain.
+
+But if the ephemeral Being who has imagined these eternal
+spheres and spaces, must dwell almost as an alien in their icy
+vastness, yet what a splendour lights up for him and dazzles in
+those great halls! Anything less limitless would be now a
+prison; and he even dares to think beyond their boundaries, to
+surmise that he may one day outgrow this vast Mausoleum, and
+cast from him the material Creation as an integument too narrow
+for his insolent Mind.
+
+
+
+
+_Dissatisfaction_
+
+
+For one thing I hate Spiders--I dislike all kinds of Insects.
+Their cold intelligence, their empty, stereotyped, unremitted
+industry repel me. And I am not altogether happy about the
+future of the Human Race; when I think of the slow refrigeration
+of the Earth, the Sun's waning, and the ultimate, inevitable
+collapse of the Solar System, I have grave misgivings. And all
+the books I have read and forgotten-the thought that my mind is
+really nothing but a sieve--this, too, at times disheartens me.
+
+
+
+
+_A Fancy_
+
+More than once, though, I have pleased myself with the notion
+that somewhere there is good Company which will like this little
+Book--these Thoughts (if I may call them so) dipped up from that
+phantasmagoria or phosphorescence which, by some unexplained
+process of combustion, flickers over the large lump of soft gray
+matter in the bowl of my skull.
+
+
+
+
+_They_
+
+
+Their taste is exquisite; They live in Georgian houses, in
+a world of ivory and precious china, of old brickwork and
+stone pilasters. In white drawing rooms I see Them, or on
+blue, bird-haunted lawns. They talk pleasantly of me, and
+their eyes watch me. From the diminished, ridiculous picture
+of myself which the glass of the world gives me, I turn for
+comfort, for happiness, to my image in the kindly mirror of
+those eyes.
+
+Who are They? Where, in what paradise or palace, shall I ever
+find Them? I may walk all the streets, ring all the door-bells
+of the World, but I shall never find them. Yet nothing has
+value for me save In the crown of Their approval; for Their
+coming--which will never be--I build and plant, and for Them
+alone I secretly write this little Book, which They will never
+read.
+
+
+
+
+_In the Pulpit_
+
+
+The Vicar had certain literary tastes; in his youth he had
+written an _Ode to the Moon_; and he would speak of the
+difficulty he found in composing his sermons, week after week.
+
+Now I felt that if I composed and preached sermons, I should by
+no means confine myself to the Vicar's threadbare subjects--should
+preach the Wrath of God, and sound the Last Trump in
+the ears of my Hell-doomed congregation, cracking the heavens
+and dissolving the earth with the eclipses and thunders and
+earthquakes of the Day of Judgment. Then I might refresh them
+with high and incomprehensible Doctrines, beyond the reach
+of Reason--Predestination, Election, the Co-existences and
+Co-eternities of the incomprehensible Triad. And with what a
+holy vehemence would I exclaim and cry out against all forms
+of doctrinal Error--all the execrable hypotheses of the great
+Heresiarchs! Then there would be many ancient and learned and
+out-of-the-way Iniquities to denounce, and splendid, neglected
+Virtues to inculcate--Apostolic Poverty, and Virginity, that
+precious jewel, that fair garland, so prized in Heaven, but so
+rare on earth.
+
+For in the range of creeds and morals it is the highest peaks
+that shine for me with a certain splendour: it is toward those
+radiant Alps that, if I were a Clergyman, I would lead my flock
+to pasture.
+
+
+
+
+_Human Ends_
+
+
+I really was impressed, as we paced up and down the avenue, by
+the Vicar's words and weighty, weighed advice. He spoke of the
+various professions; mentioned contemporaries of his own who had
+achieved success: how one had a Seat in Parliament, would be
+given a Seat in the Cabinet when his party next came in; another
+was a Bishop with a Seat in the House of Lords; a third was a
+Barrister who was soon, it was said, to be raised to the Bench.
+
+But in spite of my good intentions, my real wish to find,
+before it is too late, some career or other for myself (and
+the question is getting serious), I am far too much at the
+mercy of ludicrous images. Front Seats, Episcopal, Judicial,
+Parliamentary Benches--were all the ends then, I asked my self,
+of serious, middle-aged ambition only things to sit on?
+
+
+
+
+_Lord Arden_
+
+
+"If I were Lord Arden," said the Vicar, "I should shut up that
+great House; it's too big--what can a young unmarried man...?"
+
+"If I were Lord Arden," said the Vicar's wife (and Mrs. La
+Mountain's tone showed how much she disapproved of that young
+Nobleman), "if I were Lord Arden, I should live there, and do my
+duty to my tenants and neighbours."
+
+"If I were Lord Arden," I said; but then it flashed vividly
+into my mind, suppose I really were this opulent young Lord?
+I quite forgot to whom I was talking; my memory was occupied
+with the names of people who had been famous for their enormous
+pleasures; who had filled their Palaces with guilty revels, and
+built Pyramids, Obelisks, and half-acre Tombs, to soothe their
+Pride. My mind kindled at the thought of these Audacities. "If
+I were Lord Arden!" I cried....
+
+
+
+
+_The Starry Heaven_
+
+
+"But what are they really? What do they say they are?" the small
+young lady asked me. We were looking up at the Stars, which were
+quivering that night in splendid hosts above the lawns and
+trees.
+
+So I tried to explain some of the views that have been held
+about them. How people first of all had thought them mere
+candles set in the sky, to guide their own footsteps when the
+Sun was gone; till wise men, sitting on the Chaldean plains, and
+watching them with aged eyes, became impressed with the solemn
+view that those still and shining lights were the executioners
+of God's decrees, and irresistible instruments of His Wrath; and
+that they moved fatally among their celestial Houses to ordain
+and set out the fortunes and misfortunes of each race of newborn
+mortals. And so it was believed that every man or woman had,
+from the cradle, fighting for or against him or her, some great
+Star, Formalhaut, perhaps, Aldebaran, Altaïr: while great Heroes
+and Princes were more splendidly attended, and marched out to
+their forgotten battles with troops and armies of heavenly
+Constellations.
+
+But this noble old view was not believed in now; the Stars were
+no longer regarded as malignant or beneficent Powers; and I
+explained how most serious people thought that somewhere--though
+just where they did not know--above the vault of Sky, was to be
+found the final home of earnest men and women; where, as a
+reward for their right views and conduct, they were to rejoice
+forever, wearing those diamonds of the starry night arranged in
+glorious crowns. This notion, however, had been disputed by
+Poets and Lovers: it was Love, according to these young
+astronomers, that moved the Sun and other Stars; the
+Constellations being heavenly palaces, where people who had
+adored each other were to meet and live always together after
+Death.
+
+Then I spoke of the modern and real immensity of the unfathomed
+Skies. But suddenly the vast meaning of my words rushed into my
+mind; I felt myself dwindling, falling through the blue. And
+yet, in these silent seconds, there thrilled through me in the
+cool sweet air and night no chill of death or nothingness; but
+the taste and joy of this Earth, this orchard-plot of earth,
+floating unknown, far away in unfathomed space, with its Moon
+and meadows.
+
+
+
+
+_My Map_
+
+
+The "Known World" I called the map which I amused myself making
+for the children's schoolroom. It included France, England,
+Italy, Greece, and all the old shores of the Mediterranean; but
+the rest I marked "Unknown"; sketching into the East the
+doubtful realms of Ninus and Semiramis; changing back Germany
+into the Hyrcanian Forest; and drawing pictures of the supposed
+inhabitants of these unexplored regions, Dog-Apes, Satyrs,
+Cannibals, and Misanthropes, Cimmerians involved in darkness,
+Amazons, and Headless Men. And all around the Map I coiled the
+coils, and curled the curling waves of the great Sea _Oceanum_,
+with the bursting cheeks of the four Winds, blowing from the
+four imagined hinges of the Universe.
+
+
+
+
+_The Snob_
+
+
+As I paced in fine company on that Terrace, I felt chosen,
+exempt, and curiously happy. There was a glamour in the air, a
+something in the special flavour of that moment that was like
+the consciousness of Salvation, or the smell of ripe peaches on
+a sunny wall.
+
+I know what you're going to call me, Reader. But I am not to be
+bullied and abashed by words. And after all, why not let oneself
+be dazzled and enchanted? Are not Illusions pleasant, and is
+this a world in which Romance hangs on every tree?
+
+And how about your own life? Is that, then, so full of golden
+visions?
+
+
+
+
+_Companions_
+
+
+Dearest, prettiest, and sweetest of my retinue, who gather
+with delicate industry bits of silk and down from the bleak
+world to make the soft nest of my fatuous repose; who ever
+whisper honied words in my ear, or trip before me holding up
+deceiving mirrors--is it Hope, or is it not rather Vanity,
+that I love the best?
+
+
+
+
+_Edification_
+
+
+"I must really improve my Mind," I tell myself, and once more
+begin to patch and repair that crazy structure. So I toil and
+toil on at the vain task of edification, though the wind tears
+off the tiles, the floors give way, the ceilings fall, strange
+birds build untidy nests in the rafters, and owls hoot and laugh
+in the tumbling chimneys.
+
+
+
+
+_The Rose_
+
+
+The old lady had always been proud of the great rose-tree in her
+garden, and was fond of telling how it had grown from a cutting
+she had brought years before from Italy, when she was first
+married. She and her husband had been travelling back in their
+carriage from Rome (it was before the time of railways), and on
+a bad piece of road south of Siena they had broken down, and had
+been forced to pass the night in a little house by the roadside.
+The accommodation was wretched of course; she had spent a
+sleepless night, and rising early had stood, wrapped up, at her
+window, with the cool air blowing on her face, to watch the
+dawn. She could still, after all these years, remember the blue
+mountains with the bright moon above them, and how a far-off
+town on one of the peaks had gradually grown whiter and whiter,
+till the moon faded, the mountains were touched with the pink
+of the rising sun, and suddenly the town was lit as by an
+illumination, one window after another catching and reflecting
+the sun's beams, till at last the whole little city twinkled and
+sparkled up in the sky like a nest of stars.
+
+That morning, finding they would have to wait while their
+carriage was being repaired, they had driven in a local
+conveyance up to the city on the mountain, where they had been
+told they would find better quarters; and there they had stayed
+two or three days. It was one of the miniature Italian cities
+with a high church, a pretentious piazza, a few narrow streets
+and little palaces, perched all compact and complete, on the top
+of a mountain, within an enclosure of walls hardly larger than
+an English kitchen garden. But it was full of life and noise,
+echoing all day and all night with the sounds of feet and
+voices.
+
+The Café of the simple inn where they stayed was the meeting-place
+of the notabilities of the little city; the _Sindaco_, the
+_avvocato_, the doctor, and a few others; and among them they
+noticed a beautiful, slim, talkative old man, with bright black
+eyes and snow-white hair--tail and straight and still with
+the figure of a youth, although the waiter told them with
+pride that the _Conte_ was _molto vecchio_--would in fact be
+eighty in the following year. He was the last of his family, the
+waiter added--they had once been great and rich people--but he
+had no descendants; in fact the waiter mentioned with complacency,
+as if it were a story on which the locality prided itself, that
+the _Conte_ had been unfortunate in love, and had never married.
+
+The old gentleman, however, seemed cheerful enough; and it was
+plain that he took an interest in the strangers, and wished to
+make their acquaintance. This was soon effected by the friendly
+waiter; and after a little talk the old man invited them to
+visit his villa and garden which were just outside the walls of
+the town. So the next afternoon, when the sun began to descend,
+and they saw in glimpses through doorways and windows blue
+shadows beginning to spread over the brown mountains, they went
+to pay their visit. It was not much of a place, a small,
+modernized stucco villa, with a hot pebbly garden, and in it a
+stone basin with torpid gold fish, and a statue of Diana and her
+hounds against the wall. But what gave a glory to it was a
+gigantic rose-tree which clambered over the house, almost
+smothering the windows, and filling the air with the perfume
+of its sweetness. Yes, it was a fine rose, the _Conte_ said
+proudly when they praised it, and he would tell the Signora
+about it. And as they sat there, drinking the wine he offered
+them, he alluded with the cheerful indifference of old age to
+his love-affair, as though he took for granted that they had
+heard of it already.
+
+"The lady lived across the valley there beyond that hill. I was
+a young man then, for it was many years ago. I used to ride over
+to see her; it was a long way, but I rode fast, for young men,
+as no doubt the Signora knows, are impatient. But the lady was
+not kind, she would keep me waiting, oh, for hours; and one day
+when I had waited very long I grew very angry, and as I walked
+up and down in the garden where she had told me she would see
+me, I broke one of her roses, broke a branch from it; and when I
+saw what I had done, I hid it inside my coat--so--and when I
+came home I planted it, and the Signora sees how it has grown.
+If the Signora admires it, I must give her a cutting to plant
+also in her garden; I am told the English have beautiful gardens
+that are green, and not burnt with the sun like ours."
+
+The next day, when their mended carriage had come up to fetch
+them, and they were just starting to drive away from the inn,
+the _Conte's_ old servant appeared with the rose-cutting neatly
+wrapped up, and the compliments and wishes for a _buon viaggio_
+from her master. The town collected to see them depart, and the
+children ran after their carriage through the gate of the little
+city. They heard a rush of feet behind them for a few moments,
+but soon they were far down toward the valley; the little town
+with all its noise and life was high above them on its mountain
+peak.
+
+She had planted the rose at home, where it had grown and
+flourished in a wonderful manner, and every June the great mass
+of leaves and shoots still broke out into a passionate splendour
+of scent and scarlet colour, as if in its root and fibres there
+still burnt the anger and thwarted desire of that Italian lover.
+Of course the old _Conte_ must have died many years ago; she had
+forgotten his name, and had even forgotten the name of the
+mountain city that she had stayed in, after first seeing it
+twinkling at dawn in the sky, like a nest of stars.
+
+
+
+
+_The Vicar of Lynch_
+
+
+When I heard through country gossip of the strange happening at
+Lynch which had caused so great a scandal, and led to the
+disappearance of the deaf old Vicar of that remote village, I
+collected all the reports I could about it, for I felt that at
+the centre of this uncomprehending talk and wild anecdote there
+was something with more meaning than a mere sudden outbreak of
+blasphemy and madness.
+
+It appeared that the old Vicar, after some years spent in the
+quiet discharge of his parochial duties, had been noticed to
+become more and more odd in his appearance and behaviour; and
+it was also said that he had gradually introduced certain
+alterations into the Church services. These had been vaguely
+supposed at the time to be of a High Church character, but
+afterwards they were put down to a growing mental derangement,
+which had finally culminated at that notorious Harvest Festival,
+when his career as a clergyman of the Church of England had
+ended. On this painful occasion the old man had come into church
+outlandishly dressed, and had gone through a service with
+chanted gibberish and unaccustomed gestures, and prayers which
+were unfamiliar to his congregation. There was also talk of a
+woman's figure on the altar, which the Vicar had unveiled at a
+solemn moment in this performance; and I also heard echo of
+other gossip--gossip that was, however, authoritatively
+contradicted and suppressed as much as possible--about the use
+of certain other symbols of a most unsuitable kind. Then a few
+days after the old man had disappeared--some of the neighbours
+believed that he was dead; some, that he was now shut up in an
+asylum for the insane.
+
+Such was the fantastic and almost incredible talk I listened to,
+but in which, as I say, I found much more meaning than my
+neighbours. For one thing, although they knew that the Vicar had
+come from Oxford to this remote College living, they knew
+nothing of his work and scholarly reputation in that University,
+and none of them had probably ever heard of--much less read--an
+important book which he had written, and which was the standard
+work on his special subject. To them he was simply a deaf,
+eccentric, and solitary clergyman; and I think I was the only
+person in the neighbourhood who had conversed with him on the
+subject concerning which he was the greatest living authority in
+England.
+
+For I had seen the old man once--curiously enough at the time of
+a Harvest Festival, though it was some years before the one
+which had led to his disappearance. Bicycling one day over the
+hills, I had ridden down into a valley of cornfields, and then,
+passing along an unfenced road that ran across a wide expanse of
+stubble, I came, after getting off to open three or four gates,
+upon a group of thatched cottages, with a little, unrestored
+Norman church standing among great elms, I left my bicycle and
+walked through the churchyard, and as I went into the church,
+through its deeply-recessed Norman doorway, a surprisingly
+pretty sight met my eyes. The dim, cool, little interior was
+set out and richly adorned with an abundance of fruit and
+vegetables, yellow gourds, apples and plums and golden wheat
+sheaves, great loaves of bread, and garlands of September
+flowers. A shabby-looking old clergyman was standing on the top
+of a step-ladder, finishing the decorations, when I entered. As
+soon as he saw me he came down, and I spoke to him, praising the
+decorations, and raising my voice a little, for I noticed that
+he was somewhat deaf. We talked of the Harvest Festival, and as
+I soon perceived that I was talking with a man of books and
+University education, I ventured to hint at what had vividly
+impressed me in that old, gaudily-decorated church--its pagan
+character, as if it were a rude archaic temple in some corner of
+the antique world, which had been adorned, two thousand years
+ago, by pious country folk for some local festival. The old
+clergyman was not in the least shocked by my remark; it seemed
+indeed rather to please him; there was, he agreed, something of
+a pagan character in the modern Harvest Festival--it was no
+doubt a bit of the old primitive Vegetation Ritual, the old
+Religion of the soil; a Festival, which, like so many others,
+had not been destroyed by Christianity, but absorbed into it,
+and given a new meaning. "Indeed," he added, talking on as if
+the subject interested him, and expressing himself with a
+certain donnish carefulness of speech that I found pleasant to
+listen to, "the Harvest Festival is undoubtedly a survival of
+the prehistoric worship of that Corn Goddess who, in classical
+times, was called Demeter and Ioulo and Ceres, but whose cult as
+an Earth-Mother and Corn-Spirit is of much greater antiquity.
+For there is no doubt that this Vegetation Spirit has been
+worshipped from the earliest times by agricultural peoples; the
+wheat fields and ripe harvests being naturally suggestive of the
+presence amid the corn of a kindly Being, who, in return for due
+rites and offerings, will vouchsafe nourishing rains and golden
+harvests." He mentioned the references in Virgil, and the
+description in Theocritus of a Sicilian Harvest Festival--these
+were no doubt familiar to me; but if I was interested in the
+subject, I should find, he said, much more information collected
+in a book which he had written, but of which I had probably
+never heard, about the Vegetation Deities in Greek Religion. As
+it happened I knew the book, and felt now much interested in my
+chance meeting with the distinguished author; and after
+expressing this as best I could, I rode off, promising to visit
+him again. This promise I was never able to fulfil; but when
+afterwards, on my return to the neighbourhood, I heard of that
+unhappy scandal, my memory of this meeting and our talk enabled
+me to form a theory as to what had really happened.
+
+It seemed plain to me that the change had been too violent for
+this elderly scholar, taken from his books and college rooms and
+set down in the solitude of this remote valley, amid the
+richness and living sap of Nature. The gay spectacle, right
+under his old eyes, of growing shoots and budding foliage, of
+blossoming and flowering, and the ripening of fruits and crops,
+had little by little (such was my theory) unhinged his brains.
+More and more his thoughts had come to dwell, not on the
+doctrines of the Church in which he had long ago taken orders,
+but on the pagan rites which had formed his life-long study,
+and which had been the expression of a life not unlike the
+agricultural life amid which he now found himself living. So as
+his derangement grew upon him in his solitude, he had gradually
+transformed, with a maniac's cunning, the Christian services,
+and led his little congregation, all unknown to themselves, back
+toward their ancestral worship of the Corn-Goddess. At last he
+had thrown away all disguise, and had appeared as a hierophant
+of Demeter, dressed in a fawn skin, with a crown of poplar
+leaves, and pedantically carrying the mystic basket and the
+winnowing fan appropriate to these mysteries. The wheaten posset
+he offered the shocked communicants belonged to these also, and
+the figure of a woman on the altar was of course the holy
+Wheatsheaf, whose unveiling was the culminating point in that
+famous ritual.
+
+It is much to be regretted that I could not recover full and
+more exact details of that celebration in which this great
+scholar had probably embodied his mature knowledge concerning a
+subject which has puzzled generations of students. But what
+powers of careful observation could one expect from a group of
+labourers and small farmers? Some of the things that reached my
+ears I refused to believe--the mention of pig's blood for
+instance, and especially the talk of certain grosser symbols,
+which the choir boys, it was whispered, had carried about the
+church in ceremonious procession. Village people have strange
+imaginations; and to this event, growing more and more monstrous
+as they talked it over, they must themselves have added this
+grotesque detail. However, I have written to consult an Oxford
+authority on this interesting point, and he has been kind enough
+to explain at length that although at the _Haloa_, or winter
+festival of the Corn-Goddess, and also at the _Chloeia_, or
+festival in early spring, some symbolization of the reproductive
+powers of Nature would be proper and appropriate, it would have
+been quite out of place at the _Thalysia_, or autumn festival of
+thanksgiving. I feel certain that a solecism of this nature--the
+introduction into a particular rite of features not sanctioned
+by the texts--would have seemed a shocking thing, even to the
+unhinged mind of one who had always been so careful a scholar.
+
+
+
+
+_Tu Quoque Fontium_
+
+
+Just to sit in the Sun, to bask like an animal in its heat--this
+is one of my country recreations. And often I reflect what a
+thing after all it is still to be alive and sitting here, above
+all the buried people of the world, in the kind and famous
+Sunshine.
+
+Beyond the orchard there is a place where the stream, hurrying out
+from under a bridge, makes for itself a quiet pool. A beech-tree
+upholds its green light over the blue water; and there, when I
+have grown weary of the sun, the great glaring indiscriminating
+Sun, I can shade myself and read my book. And listening to this
+water's pretty voices I invent for it exquisite epithets, calling
+it _silver-clean_ or _moss-margined_ or _nymph-frequented_, and
+idly promise to place it among the learned fountains and pools
+of the world, making of it a cool green thought for English exiles
+in the dust and glare of Eastern deserts.
+
+
+
+
+_The Spider_
+
+
+What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind?
+To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to
+a barrel full of floating froth and refuse?
+
+No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung
+on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with
+dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the
+Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny
+Soul.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+_"Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: Through spacious streets
+conduct thy bard along."_
+
+Gay's _Trivia, or New Art of Walking Streets of London._
+
+
+
+
+_L'oiseau Bleu_
+
+
+What is it, I have more than once asked myself, what is it that
+I am looking for in my walks about London? Sometimes it seems to
+me as if I were following a Bird, a bright Bird that sings
+sweetly as it floats about from one place to another.
+
+When I find myself however among persons of middle age and settled
+principles, see them moving regularly to their offices--what keeps
+them going? I ask myself. And I feel ashamed of myself and my Bird.
+
+There is though a Philosophic Doctrine--I studied it at College,
+and I know that many serious people believe it--which maintains
+that all men, in spite of appearances and pretensions, all live
+alike for Pleasure. This theory certainly brings portly,
+respected persons very near to me. Indeed with a sense of low
+complicity I have sometimes followed and watched a Bishop. Was
+he too on the hunt for Pleasure, solemnly pursuing his Bird?
+
+
+
+
+_At The Bank_
+
+
+Entering the Bank in a composed manner, I drew a cheque and
+handed it to the cashier through the grating. Then I eyed him
+narrowly. Would not that astute official see that I was only
+posing as a Real Person? No; he calmly opened a little drawer,
+took out some real sovereigns, counted them carefully, and
+handed them to me in a brass-tipped shovel. I went away feeling
+I had perpetrated a delightful fraud. I had got some of the gold
+of the actual world!
+
+Yet now and then, at the sight of my name on a visiting card, or
+of my face photographed in a group among other faces, or when I
+see a letter addressed in my hand, or catch the sound of my own
+voice, I grow shy in the presence of a mysterious Person who is
+myself, is known by my name, and who apparently does exist. Can
+it be possible that I am as real as any one else, and that all
+of us--the cashier and banker at the Bank, the King on his
+throne--all feel ourselves like ghosts and goblins in this
+authentic world?
+
+
+
+
+_Mammon_
+
+
+Moralists and Church Fathers have named it the root of all Evil,
+the begetter of hate and bloodshed, the sure cause of the soul's
+damnation. It has been called "trash," "muck," "dunghill
+excrement," by grave authors. The love of it is denounced in all
+Sacred Writings; we find it reprehended on Chaldean bricks, and
+in the earliest papyri. Buddha, Confucius, Christ, set their
+faces against it; and they have been followed in more modern
+times by beneficed Clergymen, Sunday School Teachers, and the
+leaders of the Higher Thought. But have the condemnations of all
+the ages done anything to tarnish that bright lustre? Men dig
+for it ever deeper into the earth's intestines, travel in search
+of it farther and farther to arctic and unpleasant regions.
+
+In spite of all my moral reading, I must confess that I like to
+have some of this gaudy substance in my pocket. Its presence
+cheers and comforts me, diffuses a genial warmth through my
+body. My eyes rejoice in the shine of it; its clinquant sound is
+music in my ears. Since I then am in his paid service, and
+reject none of the doles of his bounty, I too dwell in the House
+of Mammon. I bow before the Idol, and taste the unhallowed
+ecstasy.
+
+How many Altars have been overthrown, and how many Theologies
+and heavenly Dreams have had their bottoms knocked out of them,
+while He has sat there, a great God, golden and adorned, and
+secure on His unmoved throne?
+
+
+
+
+_I See the World_
+
+
+"But you go nowhere, see nothing of the world," my cousins said.
+Now though I do go sometimes to the parties to which I am now
+and then invited, I find, as a matter of fact, that I get really
+much more pleasure by looking in at windows, and have a way of
+my own of seeing the World. And of summer evenings, when motors
+hurry through the late twilight, and the great houses take on
+airs of inscrutable expectation, I go owling out through the
+dusk; and wandering toward the West, lose my way in unknown
+streets--an unknown City of revels. And when a door opens and a
+bediamonded Lady moves to her motor over carpets unrolled by
+powdered footmen, I can easily think her some great Courtezan,
+or some half-believed Duchess, hurrying to card-tables and lit
+candles and strange scenes of joy. I like to see that there are
+still splendid people on this flat earth; and at dances,
+standing in the street with the crowd, and stirred by the music,
+the lights, the rushing sound of voices, I think the Ladies as
+beautiful as Stars who move up those lanes of light past our
+rows of vagabond faces; the young men look like Lords in novels;
+and if (it has once or twice happened) people I know go by me,
+they strike me as changed and rapt beyond my sphere. And when on
+hot nights windows are left open, and I can look in at Dinner
+Parties, as I peer through lace curtains and window-flowers at
+the silver, the women's shoulders, the shimmer of their jewels,
+and the divine attitudes of their heads as they lean and listen,
+I imagine extraordinary intrigues and unheard of wines and
+passions.
+
+
+
+
+_Social Success_
+
+
+The servant gave me my coat and hat, and in a glow of
+self-satisfaction I walked out into the night. "A delightful evening," I
+reflected, "the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and
+French philosophy impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a
+pig squealing."
+
+But soon after, "God, it's awful," I muttered, "I wish I were dead."
+
+
+
+
+_Apotheosis_
+
+
+But Oh, those heavenly moments when I feel this trivial universe
+too small to contain my Attributes; when a sense of the divine
+Ipseity invades me; when I know that my voice is the voice of
+Truth, and my umbrella God's umbrella!
+
+
+
+
+_The Spring in London_
+
+
+London seemed last winter like an underground city; as if its
+low sky were the roof of a cave, and its murky day a light such
+as one reads of in countries beneath the earth.
+
+And yet the natural sunlight sometimes shone there; white clouds
+voyaged in the blue sky; the interminable multitudes of roofs
+were washed with silver by the Moon, or cloaked with a mantle of
+new-fallen snow. And the coming of Spring to London was to me
+not unlike the descent of the maiden-goddess into Death's
+Kingdoms, when pink almond blossoms blew about her in the gloom,
+and those shadowy people were stirred with faint longings for
+meadows and the shepherd's life. Nor was there anything more
+virginal and fresh in wood or orchard than the shimmer of young
+foliage, which, in May, dimmed with delicate green all the
+smoke-blackened London trees.
+
+
+
+
+_Fashion Plates_
+
+
+I like loitering at the bookstalls, looking in at the windows of
+printshops, and romancing over the pictures I see of shepherdesses
+and old-fashioned Beauties. Tall and slim and crowned with plumes
+in one period, in another these Ladies become as wide-winged as
+butterflies, or float, large, balloon-like visions, down summer
+streets. And yet in all shapes they have always (I tell myself)
+created thrilling effects of beauty, and waked in the breasts of
+modish young men ever the same charming Emotion.
+
+But then I have questioned this. Is the emotion always precisely
+the same? Is it true to say that the human heart remains quite
+unchanged beneath all the changing fashions of frills and
+ruffles? In this elegant and cruel Sentiment, I rather fancy
+that colour and shape do make a difference. I have a notion that
+about 1840 was the Zenith, the Meridian Hour, the Golden Age of
+the Passion. Those tight-waisted, whiskered Beaux, those
+crinolined Beauties, adored one another, I believe, with a
+leisure, a refinement, and dismay not quite attainable at other
+dates.
+
+
+
+
+_Mental Vice_
+
+
+There are certain hackneyed Thoughts that will force them-selves
+on me; I find my mind, especially in hot weather, infested and
+buzzed about by moral Platitudes. "That shows--" I say to
+myself, or, "How true it is--" or, "I really ought to have
+known!" The sight of a large clock sets me off into musings on
+the flight of Time; a steamer on the Thames or lines of
+telegraph inevitably suggest the benefits of Civilization, man's
+triumph over Nature, the heroism of Inventors, the courage, amid
+ridicule and poverty, of Stephenson and Watt. Like faint, rather
+unpleasant smells, these thoughts lurk about railway stations. I
+can hardly post a letter without marvelling at the excellence
+and accuracy of the Postal System.
+
+Then the pride in the British Constitution and British Freedom,
+which comes over me when I see, even in the distance, the Towers
+of Westminster Palace--that Mother of Parliaments--it is not
+much comfort that this should be chastened, as I walk down the
+Embankment, by the sight of Cleopatra's Needle, and the Thought
+that it will no doubt witness the Fall of the British, as it has
+that of other Empires, remaining to point its Moral, as old as
+Egypt, to Antipodeans musing on the dilapidated bridges.
+
+I am sometimes afraid of finding that there is a moral for
+everything; that the whole great frame of the Universe has a key,
+like a box; has been contrived and set going by a well-meaning
+but humdrum Eighteenth-century Creator. It would be a kind of
+Hell, surely, a world in which everything could be at once
+explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated with
+Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, industrious bees,
+and preaching animals. The benefits of Civilization cloy me. I
+have seen enough shining of the didactic Sun.
+
+So gazing up on hot summer nights at the London stars, I cool my
+thoughts with a vision of the giddy, infinite, meaningless waste
+of Creation, the blazing Suns, the Planets and frozen Moons, all
+crashing blindly forever across the void of space.
+
+
+
+
+_The Organ of Life_
+
+
+Almost always In London--in the congregated uproar of streets,
+or in the noise that drifts through wails and windows--you can
+hear the hackneyed melancholy of street music; a music which
+sounds like the actual voice of the human Heart, singing the
+lost joys, the regrets, the loveless lives of the people who
+blacken the pavements, or jolt along on the busses.
+
+"Speak to me kindly," the hand-organ implores; "I'm all alone!"
+it screams amid the throng; "thy Vows are all broken," it
+laments in dingy courtyards, "And light is thy Fame." And of hot
+summer afternoons, the Cry for Courage to Remember, or Calmness
+to Forget, floats in with the smell of paint and asphalt--faint
+and sad--through open office windows.
+
+
+
+
+_Humiliation_
+
+
+"My own view is," I began, but no one listened. At the next
+pause, "I always say," I remarked, but again the loud talk went
+on. Someone told a story. When the laughter had ended, "I often
+think--"; but looking round the table I could catch no friendly
+or attentive eye. It was humiliating, but more humiliating the
+thought that Sophocles and Goethe would have always commanded
+attention, while the lack of it would not have troubled Spinoza
+or Abraham Lincoln.
+
+
+
+
+_Green Ivory_
+
+
+What a bore it is, waking up in the morning always the same
+person. I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big,
+bushy eyebrows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep
+Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist.
+
+I should like to be refined and melancholy, the victim of a
+hopeless passion; to love in the old, stilted way, with
+impossible Adoration and Despair under the pale-faced Moon.
+
+I wish I could get up; I wish I were the world's greatest
+Violinist. I wish I had lots of silver, and first Editions, and
+green ivory.
+
+
+
+
+_In The Park_
+
+
+"Yes," I said one afternoon in the Park, as I looked rather
+contemptuously at the people of Fashion, moving slow and
+well-dressed in the sunshine, "but how about the others, the
+Courtiers and Beauties and Dandies of the past? They wore
+fine costumes, and glittered for their hour in the summer
+air. What has become of them?" I somewhat rhetorically asked.
+They were all dead now. Their day was over. They were cold
+in their graves.
+
+And I thought of those severe spirits who, in garrets far from
+the Park and Fashion, had scorned the fumes and tinsel of the
+noisy World.
+
+But, good Heavens! these severe spirits were, it occurred to me,
+all, as a matter of fact, quite as dead as the others.
+
+
+
+
+_The Correct_
+
+
+I am sometimes visited by a suspicion that everything isn't
+quite all right with the Righteous; that the Moral Law speaks in
+muffled and dubious tones to those who listen most scrupulously
+for its dictates. I feel sure I have detected a look of doubt
+and misgiving in the eyes of its earnest upholders.
+
+But there is no such shadow or cloud on the faces in Club
+windows, or in the eyes of drivers of four-in-hands, or of
+fashionable young men walking down Piccadilly. For these live
+by a Rule which has not been drawn down from far-off and
+questionable skies, and needs no sanction; what they do is
+Correct, and that is all. Correctly dressed from head to foot,
+they pass, with correct speech and thoughts and gestures,
+correctly across the roundness of the Earth.
+
+
+
+
+_"Where Do I Come In?"_
+
+
+When I read in the _Times_ about India and all its problems and
+populations; when I look at the letters in large type of
+important personages, and find myself face to face with the
+Questions, Movements, and great Activities of the Age, "Where do
+I come in?" I ask myself uneasily.
+
+Then in the great _Times_-reflected world I find the corner
+where I play my humble but necessary part. For I am one of the
+unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be
+a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die,
+in constant ratios; who regularly lose so many umbrellas, post
+just so many unaddressed letters every year. And there are
+enthusiasts among us who, without the least thought of their own
+convenience, allow omnibuses to run over them; or throw
+themselves month by month, in fixed numbers, from the London
+bridges.
+
+
+
+
+_Microbes_
+
+
+But how Is one to keep free from those mental microbes that
+worm-eat people's brains--those Theories and Diets and Enthusiasms
+and infectious Doctrines that we are always liable to catch from
+what seem the most innocuous contacts? People go about laden with
+germs; they breathe creeds and convictions on you whenever they
+open their mouths. Books and newspapers are simply creeping with
+them--the monthly Reviews seem to have room for nothing else.
+Wherewithal then shall a young man cleanse his way; and how shall
+he keep his mind immune to Theosophical speculations, and novel
+schemes of Salvation?
+
+Can he ever be sure that he won't be suddenly struck down by the
+fever of Funeral, or of Spelling Reform, or take to his bed with
+a new Sex Theory?
+
+But is this struggle for a healthy mind in a maggoty universe
+really after all worth it? Are there not soporific dreams and
+sweet deliriums more soothing than Reason? If Transmigration can
+make clear the dark Problem of Evil; if Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy can
+free us from the dominion of Death; if the belief that Bacon
+wrote Shakespeare gives a peace that the world cannot give, why
+pedantically reject such kindly solace? Why not be led with the
+others by still waters, and be made to lie down in green
+pastures?
+
+
+
+
+_The Quest_
+
+
+"We walk alone in the world," the Moralist, at the end of his
+essay on Ideal Friendship, writes somewhat sadly, "Friends such
+as we desire are dreams and fables," Yet we never quite give up
+the hope of finding them. But what awful things happen to us?
+what snubs, what set-downs we experience, what shames and
+disillusions. We can never really tell what these new unknown
+persons may do to us. Sometimes they seem nice, and then begin
+to talk like gramophones. Sometimes they grab at us with moist
+hands, or breathe hotly on our necks, or make awful confidences,
+or drench us from sentimental slop-pails. And too often, among
+the thoughts in the loveliest heads, we come on nests of woolly
+caterpillars.
+
+And yet we brush our hats, pull on our gloves, and go out and
+ring door-bells.
+
+
+
+
+_The Kaleidoscope_
+
+
+I find in my mind, in its miscellany of ideas and musings, a
+curious collection of little landscapes and pictures, shining
+and fading for no reason. Sometimes they are views in no way
+remarkable-the corner of a road, a heap of stones, an old gate.
+But there are many charming pictures, too: as I read, between my
+eyes and book, the Moon sheds down on harvest fields her chill
+of silver; I see autumnal avenues, with the leaves falling, or
+swept in heaps; and storms blow among my thoughts, with the rain
+beating forever on the fields. Then Winter's upward glare of
+snow appears; or the pink and delicate green of Spring in the
+windy sunshine; or cornfields and green waters, and youths
+bathing in Summer's golden heats.
+
+And as I walk about, certain places haunt me: a cathedral rises
+above a dark blue foreign town, the colour of ivory in the
+sunset light; now I find myself in a French garden full of
+lilacs and bees, and shut-in sunshine, with the Mediterranean
+lounging and washing outside its walls; now in a little college
+library, with busts, and the green reflected light of Oxford
+lawns--and again I hear the bells, reminding me of the familiar
+Oxford hours.
+
+
+
+
+_Oxford Street_
+
+
+One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of
+vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I
+was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted
+shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had
+faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods
+displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share
+in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious
+faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London
+traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant
+and sad--into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which
+sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence,
+blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore,
+the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace
+beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. _Om Mani
+padme hum_--I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the
+pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.
+
+Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked
+that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was
+enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the
+Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that
+turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.
+
+
+
+
+_Beauty_
+
+
+Among all the ugly mugs of the world we see now and then a face
+made after the divine pattern. Then, a wonderful thing happens
+to us; the Blue Bird sings, the golden Splendour shines, and for
+a queer moment everything seems meaningless save our impulse to
+follow those fair forms, to follow them to the clear Paradises
+they promise.
+
+Plato assures us that these moments are not (as we are apt to
+think them) mere blurs and delusions of the senses, but divine
+revelations; that in a lovely face we see imaged, as in a
+mirror, the Absolute Beauty--; it is Reality, flashing on us in
+the cave where we dwell amid shadows and darkness. Therefore we
+should follow these fair forms, and their shining footsteps will
+lead us upward to the highest heaven of Wisdom. The Poets, too,
+keep chanting this great doctrine of Beauty in grave notes to
+their golden strings. Its music floats up through the skies so
+sweet, so strange, that the very Angels seem to lean from their
+stars to listen.
+
+But, O Plato, O Shelley, O Angels of Heaven, what scrapes you do
+get us into!
+
+
+
+
+_The Power of Words_
+
+
+I thanked the club porter who helped me into my coat, and
+stepped out lightly into the vastness and freshness of the
+Night. And as I walked along my eyes were dazzling with the
+glare I had left; I still seemed to hear the sound of my speech,
+and the applause and laughter.
+
+And when I looked up at the Stars, the great Stars that bore
+me company, streaming over the dark houses as I moved, I felt
+that I was the Lord of Life; the mystery and disquieting
+meaninglessness of existence--the existence of other people,
+and of my own, were solved for me now. As for the Earth,
+hurrying beneath my feet, how bright was its journey; how
+shining the goal toward which it went swinging--you might
+really say leaping--through the sky.
+
+"I must tell the Human Race of this!" I heard my voice; saw my
+prophetic gestures, as I expounded the ultimate meaning of
+existence to the white, rapt faces of Humanity. Only to find the
+words--that troubled me; were there then no words to describe
+this Vision--divine--intoxicating?
+
+And then the Word struck me; the Word people would use. I
+stopped in the street; my Soul was silenced like a bell that
+snarls at a jarring touch. I stood there awhile and meditated on
+language, its perfidious meanness, the inadequacy, the ignominy
+of our vocabulary, and how Moralists have spoiled our words by
+distilling into them, as into little vials of poison, all their
+hatred of human joy. Away with that police-force of brutal words
+which bursts in on our best moments and arrests our finest
+feelings! This music within me, large, like the song of the
+stars--like a Glory of Angels singing--"No one has any right to
+say I am drunk!" I shouted.
+
+
+
+
+_Self-Analysis_
+
+
+"Yes, aren't they odd, the thoughts that float through one's
+mind for no reason? But why not be frank--I suppose the best of
+us are shocked at times by the things we find ourselves
+thinking. Don't you agree," I went on, not noticing (until it
+was too late) that all other conversation had ceased, and the
+whole dinner-party was listening, "don't you agree that the
+oddest of all are the improper thoughts that come into one's
+head--the unspeakable words I mean, and Obscenities?" When I
+remember that remark, I hasten to enlarge my mind with ampler
+considerations. I think of Space, and the unimportance in its
+unmeasured vastness, of our toy solar system; I lose myself in
+speculations on the lapse of Time, reflecting how at the best
+our human life on this minute and perishing planet is as brief
+as a dream.
+
+
+
+
+_The Voice of the World_
+
+
+"And what are you doing now?" The question of these school
+contemporaries of mine, and their greeting the other day in
+Piccadilly (I remember how shabby I felt as I stood talking
+to them)--for a day or two that question haunted me. And
+behind their well-bred voices I seemed to hear the voice of
+Schoolmasters and Tutors, of the Professional Classes, and
+indeed of all the world. What, as a plain matter of fact, was I
+doing, how did I spend my days? The life-days which I knew were
+numbered, and which were described in sermons and on tombstones
+as so irrevocable, so melancholy-brief.
+
+I decided to change my life. I too would be somebody in my time
+and age; my contemporaries should treat me as an important person.
+I began thinking of my endeavours, my studies by the midnight
+lamp, my risings at dawn for stolen hours of self-improvement.
+
+But alas, the day, the little day, was enough just then. It
+somehow seemed enough, just to be alive in the Spring, with the
+young green of the trees, the smell of smoke in the sunshine; I
+loved the old shops and books, the uproar darkening and
+brightening in the shabby daylight. Just a run of good-looking
+faces--and I was always looking for faces--would keep me amused.
+And London was but a dim-lit stage on which I could play in
+fancy any part I liked. I woke up in the morning like Byron to
+find myself famous; I was drawn like Chatham to St. Paul's, amid
+the cheers of the Nation, and sternly exclaimed with Cromwell,
+"Take away that bauble," as I sauntered past the Houses of
+Parliament.
+
+
+
+
+_And Anyhow_
+
+
+And anyhow, soon, so soon (in only seven million years or
+thereabouts the Encyclopaedia said) this Earth would grow cold,
+all human activities end, and the last wretched mortals freeze
+to death in the dim rays of the dying Sun.
+
+
+
+
+_Drawbacks_
+
+
+I should be all right.... If it weren't for these sudden
+visitations of Happiness, these downpourings of Heaven's blue,
+little invasions of Paradise, or waftings to the Happy Islands,
+or whatever you may call these disconcerting Moments, I should
+be like everybody else, and as blameless a rate-payer as any in
+our Row.
+
+
+
+
+_Talk_
+
+
+Once in a while, when doors are closed and curtains drawn on a
+group of free spirits, the miracle happens, and Good Talk
+begins. 'Tis a sudden illumination--the glow, it may be of
+sanctified candles, or, more likely, the blaze around a cauldron
+of gossip.
+
+Is there an ecstasy or any intoxication like it? Oh? to talk, to
+talk people into monsters, to talk one's self out of one's
+clothes, to talk God from His heaven, and turn everything in the
+world into a bright tissue of phrases!
+
+These Pentecosts and outpourings of the spirit can only occur
+very rarely, or the Universe itself would be soon talked out of
+existence.
+
+
+
+
+_The Church of England_
+
+
+I have my Anglican moments; and as I sat there that Sunday
+afternoon, in the Palladian interior of the London Church, and
+listened to the unexpressive voices chanting the correct service,
+I felt a comfortable assurance that we were in no danger of
+being betrayed into any unseemly manifestations of religious
+fervour. We had not gathered together at that performance
+to abase ourselves with furious hosannas before any dark
+Creator of an untamed Universe, no Deity of freaks and miracles
+and sinister hocus-pocus; but to pay our duty to a highly
+respected Anglican First Cause--undemonstrative, gentlemanly
+and conscientious--whom, without loss of self-respect, we
+could sincerely and decorously praise.
+
+
+
+
+_Misgiving_
+
+
+We were talking of people, and a name familiar to us all was
+mentioned. We paused and looked at each other; then soon, by
+means of anecdotes and clever touches, that personality was
+reconstructed, and seemed to appear before us, large, pink, and
+life-like, and gave a comic sketch of itself with appropriate
+poses.
+
+"Of course," I said to myself, "this sort of thing never happens
+to me." For the notion was quite unthinkable, the notion I mean
+of my own dear image, called up like this without my knowledge,
+to turn my discreet way of life into a cake-walk.
+
+
+
+
+_Sanctuaries_
+
+
+She said, "How small the world is after all!"
+
+I thought of China, of a holy mountain in the West of China,
+full of legends and sacred trees and demon-haunted caves. It
+is always enveloped in mountain mists; and in that white thick
+air I heard the faint sound of bells, and the muffled footsteps
+of innumerable pilgrims, and the reiterated mantra, _Nam-Mo,
+O-mi-to-Fo_, which they murmur as they climb its slopes. High
+up among its temples and monasteries marched processions of
+monks, with intoned services, and many prostrations, and lighted
+candles that glimmer through the fog. There in their solemn
+shrines stood the statues of the Arahats, and there, seated
+on his white elephant, loomed immense and dim, the image of
+Amitabha, the Lord of the Western Heavens.
+
+She said "Life is so complicated!" Climbing inaccessible cliffs
+of rock and ice, I shut myself within a Tibetan monastery beyond
+the Himalayan ramparts. I join with choirs of monks, intoning
+their deep sonorous dirges and unintelligible prayers; I beat
+drums, I clash cymbals, and blow at dawn from the Lamasery roofs
+conches, and loud discordant trumpets. And wandering through
+those vast and shadowy halls, as I tend the butter-lamps of the
+golden Buddhas, and watch the storms that blow across the barren
+mountains, I taste an imaginary bliss, and then pass on to other
+scenes and incarnations along the endless road that leads me to
+Nirvana.
+
+"But I do wish you would tell me what you really think?"
+
+I fled to Africa, into the depths of the dark Ashanti forest.
+There, in its gloomiest recesses, where the soil is stained with
+the blood of the negroes He has eaten, dwells that monstrous
+Deity of human shape and red colour, the great Fetish God,
+Sasabonsum. I like Sasabonsum: other Gods are sometimes moved to
+pity and forgiveness, but to Him such weakness is unknown. He is
+utterly and absolutely implacable; no gifts or prayers, no
+holocausts of human victims can appease, or ever, for one
+moment, propitiate Him.
+
+
+
+
+_Symptoms_
+
+
+"But there are certain people I simply cannot stand. A
+dreariness and sense of death come over me when I meet them--I
+really find it difficult to breathe when they are in the room,
+as if they had pumped all the air out of it. Wouldn't it
+be dreadful to produce that effect on people! But they never
+seem to be aware of it. I remember once meeting a famous
+Bore; I really must tell you about it, it shows the unbelievable
+obtuseness of such people."
+
+I told this and another story or two with great gusto, and talked
+on of my experiences and sensations, till suddenly I noticed, in
+the appearance of my charming neighbour, something--a slightly
+glazed look in her eyes, a just perceptible irregularity in her
+breathing--which turned that occasion for me into a kind of
+Nightmare.
+
+
+
+
+_Shadowed_
+
+
+I sometimes feel a little uneasy about that imagined self of
+mine--the Me of my daydreams--who leads a melodramatic life of
+his own, quite unrelated to my real existence. So one day I
+shadowed him down the street. He loitered along for a while, and
+then stood at a shop-window and dressed himself out in a gaudy
+tie and yellow waistcoat. Then he bought a great sponge and two
+stuffed birds and took them to lodgings, where he led for a
+while a shady existence. Next he moved to a big house in
+Mayfair, and gave grand dinner-parties, with splendid service
+and costly wines. His amorous adventures in this region I pass
+over. He soon sold his house and horses, gave up his motors,
+dismissed his retinue of servants, and went--saving two young
+ladies from being run over on the way--to live a life of heroic
+self-sacrifice among the poor.
+
+I was beginning to feel encouraged about him, when in passing a
+fishmonger's, he pointed at a great salmon and said, "I caught
+that fish."
+
+
+
+
+_The Incredible_
+
+
+"Yes, but they were rather afraid of you."
+
+"Afraid of _me_?"
+
+"Yes, so one of them told me afterwards."
+
+I was fairly jiggered. If my personality can inspire fear or
+respect the world must be a simpler place than I had thought it.
+Afraid of a shadow, a poor make-believe like me? Are children
+more absurdly terrified by a candle in a hollow turnip? Was
+Bedlam at full moon ever scared by anything half so silly?
+
+
+
+
+_Terror_
+
+
+A pause suddenly fell on our conversation--one of those
+uncomfortable lapses when we sit with fixed smiles, searching
+our minds for some remark with which to fill up the unseasonable
+silence. It was only a moment--"But suppose," I said to myself
+with horrible curiosity, "suppose none of us had found a word to
+say, and we had gone on sitting in silence?"
+
+It is the dread of Something happening, Something unknown and
+awful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk
+from dying out. So travellers at night in an unknown forest keep
+their fires ablaze, in fear of Wild Beasts lurking ready in the
+darkness to leap upon them.
+
+
+
+
+_Pathos_
+
+
+When winter twilight falls on my street with the rain, a sense
+of the horrible sadness of life descends upon me. I think of
+drunken old women who drown themselves because nobody loves
+them; I think of Napoleon at St. Helena, and of Byron growing
+morose and fat in the enervating climate of Italy.
+
+
+
+
+_Inconstancy_
+
+
+The rose that one wears and throws away, the friend one forgets,
+the music that passes--out of the well-known transitoriness of
+mortal things I have made myself a maxim or precept to the
+effect that it is foolish to look for one face, or to listen
+long for one voice, in a world that is after all, as I know,
+full of enchanting voices.
+
+But all the same, I can never quite forget the enthusiasm with
+which, as a boy, I read the praises of Constancy and True Love,
+and the unchanged Northern Star.
+
+
+
+
+_The Poplar_
+
+
+There is a great tree in Sussex, whose cloud of thin foliage
+floats high in the summer air. The thrush sings in it, and
+blackbirds, who fill the late, decorative sunshine with a
+shimmer of golden sound. There the nightingale finds her green
+cloister; and on those branches sometimes, like a great fruit,
+hangs the lemon-coloured Moon. In the glare of August, when all
+the world is faint with heat, there is always a breeze in those
+cool recesses, always a noise, like the noise of water, among
+its lightly hung leaves.
+
+But the owner of this Tree lives in London, reading books.
+
+
+
+
+_On the Doorstep_
+
+
+I rang the bell as of old; as of old I gazed at the great
+shining Door and waited. But, alas! that flutter and beat of the
+wild heart, that delicious doorstep Terror--it was gone; and
+with it dear, fantastic, panic-stricken Youth had rung the bell,
+flitted round the corner and vanished for ever.
+
+
+
+
+_Old Clothes_
+
+
+Shabby old waistcoat, what made the heart beat that you used to
+cover? Funny-shaped hat, where are the thoughts that once nested
+beneath you? Old shoes, hurrying along what dim paths of the
+Past did I wear out your sole-leather?
+
+
+
+
+_Youth_
+
+
+Oh dear, this living and eating and growing old; these doubts
+and aches in the back, and want of interest in the Moon and
+Roses...
+
+Am I the person who used to wake in the middle of the night and
+laugh with the joy of living? Who worried about the existence of
+God, and danced with young ladies till long after daybreak? Who
+sang "Auld Lang Syne" and howled with sentiment, and more than
+once gazed at the summer stars through a blur of great, romantic
+tears?
+
+
+
+
+_Consolation_
+
+
+The other day, depressed on the Underground, I tried to cheer
+myself by thinking over the joys of our human lot. But there
+wasn't one of them for which I seemed to care a hang--not
+Wine, nor Friendship, nor Eating, nor Making Love, nor the
+Consciousness of Virtue. Was it worth while then going up in
+a lift into a world that had nothing less trite to offer?
+
+Then I thought of reading--the nice and subtle happiness of
+reading. This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this
+polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene, life-long
+intoxication.
+
+
+
+
+_Sir Eustace Carr_
+
+
+When I read the news about Sir Eustace Carr in the morning
+paper, I was startled, like everyone else who knew, if only by
+name this young man, whose wealth and good looks, whose
+adventurous travels and whose brilliant and happy marriage, had
+made of him an almost romantic figure.
+
+Every now and then one hears of some strange happening of this
+kind. But they are acts so anomalous, in such startling
+contradiction to all our usual ways and accepted notions of life
+and its value, that most of us are willing enough to accept the
+familiar explanation of insanity, or any other commonplace cause
+which may be alleged--financial trouble, or some passionate
+entanglement, and the fear of scandal and exposure. And then the
+Suicide is forgotten as soon as possible, and his memory
+shuffled out of the way as something unpleasant to think of. But
+with a curiosity that is perhaps a little morbid, I sometimes
+let my thoughts dwell on these cases, wondering whether the dead
+man may not have carried to the grave with him the secret of
+some strange perplexity, some passion or craving or irresistible
+impulse, of which perhaps his intimates, and certainly the
+coroner's jury, can have had no inkling.
+
+I had never met or spoken to Sir Eustace Carr--the worlds we
+lived in were very different--but I had read of his explorations
+in the East, and of the curious tombs he had discovered--somewhere,
+was it not?--in the Nile Valley. Then too it happened (and this
+was the main cause of my interest) that at one time I had seen
+him more than once, under circumstances that were rather unusual.
+And now I began to think of this incident. In away it was nothing,
+and yet the impression haunted me that it was somehow connected
+with this final act, for which no explanation, beyond that of
+sudden mental derangement, had been offered. This explanation did
+not seem to me wholly adequate, although it had been accepted,
+I believe, both by his friends and the general public--and with
+the more apparent reason on account of a strain of eccentricity,
+amounting in some cases almost to insanity, which could be traced,
+it was said, in his mother's family.
+
+I found it not difficult to revive with a certain vividness the
+memory of those cold and rainy November weeks that I had
+happened to spend alone, some years ago, in Venice, and of the
+churches which I had so frequently haunted. Especially I
+remembered the great dreary church in the piazza near my
+lodgings, into which I would often go on my way to my rooms in
+the twilight. It was the season when all the Venice churches are
+draped in black, and services for the dead are held in them at
+dawn and twilight; and when I entered this Baroque interior,
+with its twisted columns and volutes and high-piled, hideous
+tombs, adorned with skeletons and allegorical figures and angels
+blowing trumpets--all so agitated, and yet all so dead and empty
+and frigid--I would find the fantastic darkness filled with
+glimmering candles, and kneeling figures, and the discordant
+noise of chanting. There I would sit, while outside night fell
+with the rain on Venice; the palaces and green canals faded into
+darkness, and the great bells, swinging against the low sky,
+sent the melancholy sound of their voices far over the lagoons.
+
+It was here, in this church, that I used to see Sir Eustace Carr;
+would generally find him in the same corner when I entered, and
+would sometimes watch his face, until the ceremonious extinguishing
+of the candles, one by one, left us in shadowy night. It was a
+handsome and thoughtful face, and I remember more than once
+wondering what had brought him to Venice in that unseasonable
+month, and why he came so regularly to this monotonous service.
+It was as if some spell had drawn him; and now, with my curiosity
+newly wakened, I asked myself what had been that spell? I also
+must have been affected by it, for I had been there also in his
+uncommunicating company. Here, I felt, was perhaps the answer to
+my question, the secret of the enigma that puzzled me; and as I
+went over my memories of that time, and revived its sombre and
+almost sinister fascination, I seemed to see an answer looming
+before my imagination. But it was an answer, an hypothesis or
+supposition, so fantastic, that my common sense could hardly
+accept it.
+
+For I now saw that the spell which had been on us both at that
+time in Venice had been nothing but the spell and tremendous
+incantation of the Thought of Death. The dreary city with its
+decaying palaces and great tomb-encumbered churches had really
+seemed, in those dark and desolate weeks, to be the home and
+metropolis of the great King of Terrors; and the services at
+dawn and twilight, with their prayers for the Dead, and funereal
+candles, had been the chanted ritual of his worship. Now suppose
+(such was the notion that held my imagination) suppose this
+spell, which I had felt but for a time and dimly, should become to
+someone a real obsession, casting its shadow more and more completely
+over a life otherwise prosperous and happy, might not this be the
+clue to a history like that of Sir Eustace Carr's--not only his
+interest in the buried East, his presence at that time in Venice,
+but also his unexplained and mysterious end?
+
+Musing on this half-believed notion, I thought of the great
+personages and great nations we read of in ancient history, who
+have seemed to live with a kind of morbid pleasure in the shadow
+of this great Thought; who have surrounded themselves with
+mementoes of Death, and hideous symbols of its power, and who,
+like the Egyptians, have found their main interest, not in the
+present, but in imaginary explorations of the unknown future;
+not on the sunlit surface of this earth, but in the vaults and
+dwelling-places of the Dead beneath it.
+
+Since this preoccupation, this curiosity, this nostalgia, has
+exercised so enormous a fascination in the past, I found it not
+impossible to imagine some modern favourite of fortune falling a
+victim to this malady of the soul; until at last, growing weary
+of other satisfactions, he might be drawn to open for himself
+the dark portal and join the inhabitants of that dim region,
+"Kings and Counsellors of the earth, Princes that had gold, who
+filled their houses with silver." This, as I say, was the notion
+that haunted me, the link my imagination forged between Sir
+Eustace Carr's presence in that dark Venetian church, and his
+self-caused death some years later. But whether it is really a
+clue to that unexplained mystery, or whether it is nothing more
+than a somewhat sinister fancy, of course, I cannot say.
+
+
+
+
+_The Lord Mayor_
+
+
+An arctic wind was blowing; it cut through me as I stood there.
+The boot-black was finishing his work and complaints.
+
+"But I should be 'appy, sir, if only I could make four bob a
+day," he said.
+
+I looked down at him; it seemed absurd, the belief of this
+crippled, half-frozen creature, that four-shillings would make
+him happy. Happiness! the fabled treasure of some far-away
+heaven I thought it that afternoon; not to be bought with gold,
+not of this earth!
+
+I said something to this effect. But four shillings a day was
+enough for the boot-black.
+
+"Why," he said, "I should be as 'appy as the Lord Mayor!"
+
+
+
+
+_The Burden_
+
+
+I know too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History
+and Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over
+books; believing in geological periods, cave-dwellers, Chinese
+Dynasties, and the fixed stars has prematurely aged me.
+
+Why am I to blame for all that is wrong in the world? I didn't
+invent Sin and Hate and Slaughter. Who made it my duty anyhow
+to administer the Universe, and keep the planets to their
+Copernican courses? My shoulders are bent beneath the weight
+of the firmament; I grow weary of propping up, like Atlas,
+this vast and erroneous Cosmos.
+
+
+
+
+_Under An Umbrella_
+
+
+From under the roof of my umbrella I saw the washed pavement
+lapsing beneath my feet, the news-posters lying smeared with
+dirt at the crossings, the tracks of the busses in the liquid
+mud. On I went through this dreary world of wetness. And
+through how many rains and years shall I still hurry down
+wet streets--middle-aged, and then, perhaps, very old? And
+on what errands?
+
+Asking myself this cheerless question I fade from your vision,
+Reader, into the distance, sloping my umbrella against the wind.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith
+
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    .side      { float: right; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
+               border-left: dashed thin; margin-left: 0.8em; text-align: left;
+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Trivia
+
+Author: Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+
+Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8544]
+This file was first posted on July 21, 2003
+Last Updated: May 13, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRIVIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Text file produced by Joris Van Dael, Charles Aldarondo, Charles
+Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+HTML file produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      TRIVIA
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Logan Pearsall Smith
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      1917
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <i>Bibliographical Note</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <i>Preface</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> <i>The Author</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> <b>TRIVIA</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> <b>BOOK I</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> <i>Happiness</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> <i>To-Day</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> <i>The Afternoon Post</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> <i>The Busy Bees</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> <i>The Wheat</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> <i>The Coming of Fate</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> <i>My Speech</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> <i>Stonehenge</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> <i>The Stars</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> <i>Silvia Doria</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> <i>Bligh House</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> <i>In Church</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> <i>Parsons</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> <i>The Sound of a Voice</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> <i>What Happens</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> <i>A Precaution</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> <i>The Great Work</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> <i>My Mission</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> <i>The Birds</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> <i>High Life</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> <i>Empty Shells</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> <i>Dissatisfaction</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> <i>A Fancy</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> <i>They</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> <i>In the Pulpit</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> <i>Human Ends</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> <i>Lord Arden</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> <i>The Starry Heaven</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0035"> <i>My Map</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0036"> <i>The Snob</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0037"> <i>Companions</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0038"> <i>Edification</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0039"> <i>The Rose</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0040"> <i>The Vicar of Lynch</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0041"> <i>Tu Quoque Fontium</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0042"> <i>The Spider</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0043"> <b>BOOK II</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0044"> <i>L'oiseau Bleu</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0045"> <i>At The Bank</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0046"> <i>Mammon</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0047"> <i>I See the World</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0048"> <i>Social Success</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0049"> <i>Apotheosis</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0050"> <i>The Spring in London</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0051"> <i>Fashion Plates</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0052"> <i>Mental Vice</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0053"> <i>The Organ of Life</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0054"> <i>Humiliation</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0055"> <i>Green Ivory</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0056"> <i>In The Park</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0057"> <i>The Correct</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0058"> <i>"Where Do I Come In?"</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0059"> <i>Microbes</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0060"> <i>The Quest</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0061"> <i>The Kaleidoscope</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0062"> <i>Oxford Street</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0063"> <i>Beauty</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0064"> <i>The Power of Words</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0065"> <i>Self-Analysis</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0066"> <i>The Voice of the World</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0067"> <i>And Anyhow</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0068"> <i>Drawbacks</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0069"> <i>Talk</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0070"> <i>The Church of England</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0071"> <i>Misgiving</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0072"> <i>Sanctuaries</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0073"> <i>Symptoms</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0074"> <i>Shadowed</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0075"> <i>The Incredible</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0076"> <i>Terror</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0077"> <i>Pathos</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0078"> <i>Inconstancy</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0079"> <i>The Poplar</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0080"> <i>On the Doorstep</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0081"> <i>Old Clothes</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0082"> <i>Youth</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0083"> <i>Consolation</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0084"> <i>Sir Eustace Carr</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0085"> <i>The Lord Mayor</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0086"> <i>The Burden</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0087"> <i>Under An Umbrella</i> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Bibliographical Note</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Some of these pieces were privately printed at the Chiswick Press in 1902.
+      Others have appeared in the "New Statesman" and "The New Republic," and
+      are here reprinted with the Editors' permission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Preface</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "You must beware of thinking too much about Style," said my kindly
+      adviser, "or you will become like those fastidious people who polish and
+      polish until there is nothing left."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Then there really are such people?" I asked, lost in the thought of how
+      much I should like to meet them. But the well-informed lady could give me
+      no precise information about them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I often hear of them in this tantalizing manner, and perhaps one day I
+      shall get to know them. They sound delightful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Author</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a large
+      Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the Animal Kingdom which
+      includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked Gorilla, the Baboon with his
+      bright blue and scarlet bottom, and the long-eared Chimpanzee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      TRIVIA
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <i>How blest my lot, in these sweet fields assign'd Where Peace and
+      Leisure soothe the tuneful mind.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      SCOTT, of Amwell, <i>Moral Eclogues</i> (1773)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Happiness</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Cricketers on village greens, haymakers in the evening sunshine, small
+      boats that sail before the wind&mdash;all these create in me the illusion
+      of Happiness, as if a land of cloudless pleasure, a piece of the old
+      Golden World, were hidden, not (as poets have imagined), in far seas or
+      beyond inaccessible mountains, but here close at hand, if one could find
+      it, in some undiscovered valley. Certain grassy lanes seem to lead between
+      the meadows thither; the wild pigeons talk of it behind the woods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>To-Day</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I woke this morning out of dreams into what we call Reality, into the
+      daylight, the furniture of my familiar bedroom&mdash;in fact into the
+      well-known, often-discussed, but, to my mind, as yet unexplained Universe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I, who came out of Eternity and seem to be on my way thither, got up
+      and spent the day as I usually spend it. I read, I pottered, I talked, and
+      took exercise; and I sat punctually down to eat the cooked meals that
+      appeared at stated intervals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Afternoon Post</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The village Post Office, with its clock and letter-box, its postmistress
+      lost in tales of love-lorn Dukes and coroneted woe, and the sallow-faced
+      grocer watching from his window opposite, is the scene of a daily crisis
+      in my life, when every afternoon I walk there through the country lanes
+      and ask that well-read young lady for my letters. I always expect good
+      news and cheques; and then, of course, there is the magical Fortune which
+      is coming, and word of it may reach me any day. What it is, this strange
+      Felicity, or whence it shall come, I have no notion; but I hurry down in
+      the morning to find the news on the breakfast table, open telegrams in
+      delighted panic, and say to myself "Here it is!" when at night I hear
+      wheels approaching along the road. So, happy in the hope of Happiness, and
+      not greatly concerned with any other interest or ambition, I live on in my
+      quiet, ordered house; and so I shall live perhaps until the end. Is it,
+      indeed, merely the last great summons and revelation for which I am
+      waiting? I do not know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Busy Bees</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sitting for hours idle in the shade of an apple tree, near the
+      garden-hives, and under the aerial thoroughfares of those honey-merchants&mdash;sometimes
+      when the noonday heat is loud with their minute industry, or when they
+      fall in crowds out of the late sun to their night-long labours-I have
+      sought instruction from the Bees, and tried to appropriate to myself the
+      old industrious lesson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet, hang it all, who by rights should be the teachers and who the
+      learners? For those peevish, over-toiled, utilitarian insects, was there
+      no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of Me? Gazing out at me with
+      myriad eyes from their joyless factories, might they not learn at last&mdash;might
+      I not finally teach them&mdash;a wiser and more generous-hearted way to
+      improve the shining hour?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Wheat</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Vicar, whom I met once or twice in my walks about the fields, told me
+      that he was glad that I was taking an interest in farming. Only my feeling
+      about wheat, he said, puzzled him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the feeling in regard to wheat which I had not been able to make clear
+      to the Vicar was simply one of amazement. Walking one day into a field
+      that I had watched yellowing beyond the trees, I found myself dazzled by
+      the glow and great expanse of gold. I bathed myself in the intense yellow
+      under the intense blue sky; how dim it made the oak trees and copses and
+      all the rest of the English landscape seem! I had not remembered the glory
+      of the Wheat; nor imagined in my reading that in a country so far from the
+      Sun there could be anything so rich, so prodigal, so reckless, as this
+      opulence of ruddy gold, bursting out from the cracked earth as from some
+      fiery vein below. I remembered how for thousands of years Wheat had been
+      the staple of wealth, the hoarded wealth of famous cities and empires; I
+      thought of the processes of corn-growing, the white oxen ploughing, the
+      great barns, the winnowing fans, the mills with the splash of their
+      wheels, or arms slow-turning in the wind; of cornfields at harvest-time,
+      with shocks and sheaves in the glow of sunset, or under the sickle moon;
+      what beauty it brought into the northern landscape, the antique,
+      passionate, Biblical beauty of the South!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Coming of Fate</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When I seek out the sources of my thoughts, I find they had their
+      beginning in fragile Chance; were born of little moments that shine for me
+      curiously in the past. Slight the impulse that made me take this turning
+      at the crossroads, trivial and fortuitous the meeting, and light as
+      gossamer the thread that first knit me to my friend. These are full of
+      wonder; more mysterious are the moments that must have brushed me with
+      their wings and passed me by: when Fate beckoned and I did not see it,
+      when new Life trembled for a second on the threshold; but the word was not
+      spoken, the hand was not held out, and the Might-have-been shivered and
+      vanished, dim as a into the waste realms of non-existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life,
+      with its meetings and words and accidents. Why, to-day, perhaps, or next
+      week, I may hear a voice, and, packing up my Gladstone bag, follow it to
+      the ends of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>My Speech</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "Ladies and Gentlemen," I began&mdash;The Vicar was in the chair; Mrs. La
+      Mountain and her daughters sat facing us; and in the little schoolroom,
+      with its maps and large Scripture prints, its blackboard with the day's
+      sums still visible on it, were assembled the labourers of the village, the
+      old family coachman and his wife, the one-eyed postman, and the gardeners
+      and boys from the Hall. Having culled from the newspapers a few phrases, I
+      had composed a speech which I delivered with a spirit and eloquence
+      surprising even to myself, and which was now enthusiastically received.
+      The Vicar cried "Hear, Hear!", the Vicar's wife pounded her umbrella with
+      such emphasis, and the villagers cheered so heartily, that my heart was
+      warmed. I began to feel the meaning of my own words; I beamed on the
+      audience, felt that they were all brothers, all wished well to the
+      Republic; and it seemed to me an occasion to express my real ideas and
+      hopes for the Commonwealth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brushing therefore to one side, and indeed quite forgetting my safe
+      principles, I began to refashion and new-model the State. Most existing
+      institutions were soon abolished; and then, on their ruins, I proceeded to
+      build up the bright walls and palaces of the City within me&mdash;the City
+      I had read of in Plato. With enthusiasm, and, I flatter myself, with
+      eloquence, I described it all&mdash;the Warriors, that race of golden
+      youth bred from the State-ordered embraces of the brave and fair; those
+      philosophic Guardians, who, being ever accustomed to the highest and most
+      extensive views, and thence contracting an habitual greatness, possessed
+      the truest fortitude, looking down indeed with a kind of disregard on
+      human life and death. And then, declaring that the pattern of this City
+      was laid up in Heaven, I sat down, amid the cheers of the uncomprehending
+      little audience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And afterward, in my rides about the country, when I saw on walls and the
+      doors of barns, among advertisements of sales, or regulations about birds'
+      eggs or the movements of swine, little weather-beaten, old-looking notices
+      on which it was stated that I would "address the meeting," I remembered
+      how the walls and towers of the City I had built up in that little
+      schoolroom had shone with no heavenly light in the eyes of the Vicar's
+      party.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Stonehenge</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      They sit there forever on the dim horizon of my mind, that Stonehenge
+      circle of elderly disapproving Faces&mdash;Faces of the Uncles and
+      Schoolmasters and Tutors who frowned on my youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the bright centre and sunlight I leap, I caper, I dance my dance; but
+      when I look up, I see they are not deceived. For nothing ever placates
+      them, nothing ever moves to a look of approval that ring of bleak and
+      contemptuous Faces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Stars</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Battling my way homeward one dark night against the wind and rain, a
+      sudden gust, stronger than the others, drove me back into the shelter of a
+      tree. But soon the Western sky broke open; the illumination of the Stars
+      poured down from behind the dispersing clouds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they filled the night
+      with their soft lustre. So I went my way accompanied by them; Arcturus
+      followed me, and becoming entangled in a leafy tree, shone by glimpses,
+      and then emerged triumphant, Lord of the Western sky. Moving along the
+      road in the silence of my own footsteps, my thoughts were among the
+      Constellations. I was one of the Princes of the starry Universe; in me
+      also there was something that was not insignificant and mean and of no
+      account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Silvia Doria</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Beyond the blue hills, within riding distance, there is a country of parks
+      and beeches, with views of the far-off sea. I remember in one of my rides
+      coming on the place which was the scene of the pretty, old-fashioned story
+      of Silvia Doria. Through the gates, with fine gate-posts, on which
+      heraldic beasts, fierce and fastidious, were upholding coroneted shields,
+      I could see, at the end of the avenue, the façade of the House, with its
+      stone pilasters, and its balustrade on the steep roof.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More than one hundred years ago, in that Park, with its Italianized house,
+      and level gardens adorned with statues and garden temples, there lived,
+      they say, an old Lord with his two handsome sons. The old Lord had never
+      ceased mourning for his Lady, though she had died a good many years
+      before; there were no neighbours he visited, and few strangers came inside
+      the great Park walls. One day in Spring, however, just when the apple
+      trees had burst into blossom, the gilded gates were thrown open, and a
+      London chariot with prancing horses drove up the Avenue. And in the
+      chariot, smiling and gay, and indeed very beautiful in her dress of yellow
+      silk, and her great Spanish hat with drooping feathers, sat Silvia Doria,
+      come on a visit to her cousin, the old Lord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was her father who had sent her&mdash;that he might be more free, some
+      said, to pursue his own wicked courses&mdash;while others declared that he
+      intended her to marry the old Lord's eldest son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In any case, Silvia Doria came like the Spring, like the sunlight, into
+      the lonely place. Even the old Lord felt himself curiously happy when he
+      heard her voice singing about the house; as for Henry and Francis, it was
+      heaven for them just to walk by her side down the garden alleys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Silvia Doria, though hitherto she had been but cold toward the London
+      gallants who had courted her, found, little by little, that her heart was
+      not untouched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, in spite of her father, and her own girlish love of gold and rank, it
+      was not for Henry that she cared, not for the old Lord, but for Francis,
+      the younger son. Did Francis know of this? They were secretly lovers, the
+      old scandal reported; and the scandal, it may be, had reached her father's
+      ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For one day a coach with foaming horses, and the wicked face of an old man
+      at its window, galloped up the avenue; and soon afterwards, when the coach
+      drove away, Silvia Doria was sitting by the old man's side, sobbing
+      bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And after she had gone, a long time, many of the old, last-century years,
+      went by without any change. And then Henry, the eldest son, was killed in
+      hunting; and the old Lord dying a few years later, the titles and the
+      great house and all the land and gold came to Francis, the younger son.
+      But after his father's death he was but seldom there; having, as it
+      seemed, no love for the place, and living for the most part abroad and
+      alone, for he never married.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And again, many years went by. The trees grew taller and darker about the
+      house; the yew hedges unclipt now, hung their branches over the moss-grown
+      paths; ivy almost smothered the statues; and the plaster fell away in
+      great patches from the discoloured garden temples.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But at last one day a chariot drove up to the gates; a footman pulled at
+      the crazy bell, telling the gate-keeper that his mistress wished to visit
+      the Park. So the gates creaked open, the chariot glittered up the avenue
+      to the deserted place; and a lady stepped out, went into the garden, and
+      walked among its moss-grown paths and statues. As the chariot drove out
+      again, "Tell your Lord," the lady said, smiling, to the lodge-keeper,
+      "that Silvia Doria came back."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Bligh House</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To the West, in riding past the walls of Bligh, I remembered an incident
+      in the well-known siege of that house, during the Civil Wars: How, among
+      Waller's invading Roundhead troops, there happened to be a young scholar,
+      a poet and lover of the Muses, fighting for the cause, as he thought, of
+      ancient Freedom, who, one day, when the siege was being more hotly urged,
+      pressing forward and climbing a wall, suddenly found himself in a quiet
+      old garden by the house. And here, for a time forgetting, as it would
+      seem, the battle, and heedless of the bullets that now and then flew past
+      him like peevish wasps, the young Officer stayed, gathering roses&mdash;old-fashioned
+      damask roses, streaked with red and white&mdash;which, for the sake of a
+      Court Beauty, there besieged with her father, he carried to the house;
+      falling, however, struck by a chance bullet, or shot perhaps by one of his
+      own party. A few of the young Officer's verses, written in the stilted
+      fashion of the time, and almost unreadable now, have been preserved. The
+      lady's portrait hangs in the white drawing room at Bligh; a simpering,
+      faded figure, with ringlets and drop-pearls, and a dress of amber-coloured
+      silk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>In Church</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "For the Pen," said the Vicar; and in the sententious pause that followed,
+      I felt that I would offer any gifts of gold to avert or postpone the
+      solemn, inevitable, hackneyed, and yet, as it seemed to me, perfectly
+      appalling statement that "the Pen is mightier than the Sword."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Parsons</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      All the same I like Parsons; they think nobly of the Universe, and believe
+      in Souls and Eternal Happiness. And some of them, I am told, believe in
+      Angels&mdash;that there are Angels who guide our footsteps, and flit to
+      and fro unseen on errands in the air about us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Sound of a Voice</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As the thoughtful Baronet talked, as his voice went on sounding in my
+      ears, all the light of desire, and of the sun, faded from the Earth; I saw
+      the vast landscape of the world dim, as in an eclipse; its populations
+      eating their bread with tears, its rich men sitting listless in their
+      palaces, and aged Kings crying "Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity!"
+      lugubriously from their thrones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>What Happens</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "Yes," said Sir Thomas, speaking of a modern novel, "it certainly does
+      seem strange; but the novelist was right. Such things do happen."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But my dear Sir," I burst out, in the rudest manner, "think what life is&mdash;just
+      think what really happens! Why people suddenly swell up and turn dark
+      purple; they hang themselves on meat-hooks; they are drowned in
+      horse-ponds, are run over by butchers' carts, and are burnt alive and
+      cooked like mutton chops!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>A Precaution</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The folio gave at length philosophic consolations for all the ills and
+      misfortunes said by the author to be inseparable from human existence&mdash;Poverty,
+      Shipwreck, Plague, Love-Deceptions, and Inundations. Against these antique
+      Disasters I armed my soul; and I thought it as well to prepare myself
+      against another inevitable ancient calamity called "Cornutation," or by
+      other less learned names. How Philosophy taught that after all it was but
+      a pain founded on conceit, a blow that hurt not; the reply of the Cynic
+      philosopher to one who reproached him, "Is it my fault or hers?"; how
+      Nevisanus advises the sufferer to ask himself if he have not offended;
+      Jerome declares it impossible to prevent; how few or none are safe, and
+      the inhabitants of some countries, especially parts of Africa, consider it
+      the usual and natural thing; How Caesar, Pompey, Augustus, Agamemnon,
+      Menelaus, Marcus Aurelius, and many other great Kings and Princes had all
+      worn Actaeon's badge; and how Philip turned it to a jest, Pertinax the
+      Emperor made no reckoning of it; Erasmus declared it was best winked at,
+      there being no remedy but patience, <i>Dies dolorem minuit</i>; Time, Age
+      must mend it; and how according to the best authorities, bars, bolts,
+      oaken doors, and towers of brass, are all in vain. "She is a woman," as
+      the old Pedant wrote to a fellow Philosopher....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Great Work</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sitting, pen in hand, alone in the stillness of the library, with flies
+      droning behind the sunny blinds, I considered in my thoughts what should
+      be the subject of my great Work. Should I complain against the mutability
+      of Fortune, and impugn Fate and the Constellations; or should I reprehend
+      the never-satisfied heart of querulous Man, drawing elegant contrasts
+      between the unsullied snow of mountains, the serene shining of stars, and
+      our hot, feverish lives and foolish repinings? Or should I confine myself
+      to denouncing contemporary Vices, crying "Fie!" on the Age with Hamlet,
+      sternly unmasking its hypocrisies, and riddling through and through its
+      comfortable Optimisms?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or with Job, should I question the Universe, and puzzle my sad brains
+      about Life&mdash;the meaning of Life on this apple-shaped Planet?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>My Mission</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But when in modern books, reviews, and thoughtful magazines I read about
+      the Needs of the Age, its Complex Questions, its Dismays, Doubts, and
+      Spiritual Agonies, I feel an impulse to go out and comfort it, to still
+      its cries, and speak earnest words of Consolation to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Birds</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But how can one toil at the great task with this hurry and tumult of birds
+      just outside the open window? I hear the Thrush, and the Blackbird, that
+      romantic liar; then the delicate cadence, the wiry descending scale of the
+      Willow-wren, or the Blackcap's stave of mellow music. All these are
+      familiar&mdash;but what is that unknown voice, that thrilling note? I
+      hurry out; the voice flees and I follow; and when I return and sit down
+      again to my task, the Yellowhammer trills his sleepy song in the noonday
+      heat; the drone of the Greenfinch lulls me into dreamy meditations. Then
+      suddenly from his tree-trunks and forest recesses comes the Green
+      Woodpecker, and mocks at me an impudent voice full of liberty and
+      laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why should all the birds of the air conspire against me? My concern is
+      with the sad Human Species, with lapsed and erroneous Humanity, not with
+      that inconsiderate, wandering, feather-headed race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>High Life</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Although that immense Country House was empty and for sale, and I had got
+      an order to view it, I needed all my courage to walk through the lordly
+      gates, and up the avenue, and then to ring the door-bell. And when I was
+      ushered in, and the shutters were removed to let the daylight into those
+      vast apartments, I sneaked through them, cursing the dishonest curiosity
+      which had brought me into a place where I had no business. But I was
+      treated with such deference, and so plainly regarded as a possible
+      purchaser, that I soon began to believe in the opulence imputed to me.
+      From all the novels describing the mysterious and glittering life of the
+      Great which I had read (and I had read many), there came to me the
+      enchanting vision of my own existence in this Palace. I filled the vast
+      spaces with the shine of jewels and stir of voices; I saw a vision of
+      ladies sweeping in their tiaras down the splendid stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But my Soul, in her swell of pride, soon outgrew these paltry limits, O
+      no! Never could I box up and house and localize under that lowly roof the
+      Magnificence and Ostentation of which I was capable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then for one thing there was stabling for only forty horses; and of
+      course, as I told them, this would never do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Empty Shells</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      They lie like empty seashells on the shores of Time, the old worlds which
+      the spirit of man once built for his habitation, and then abandoned. Those
+      little earth-centred, heaven-encrusted universes of the Greeks and Hebrews
+      seem quaint enough to us, who have formed, thought by thought from within,
+      the immense modern Cosmos in which we live&mdash;the great Creation of
+      granite, planned in such immeasurable proportions, and moved by so
+      pitiless a mechanism, that it sometimes appals even its own creators. The
+      rush of the great rotating Sun daunts us; to think to the distance of the
+      fixed stars cracks our brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But if the ephemeral Being who has imagined these eternal spheres and
+      spaces, must dwell almost as an alien in their icy vastness, yet what a
+      splendour lights up for him and dazzles in those great halls! Anything
+      less limitless would be now a prison; and he even dares to think beyond
+      their boundaries, to surmise that he may one day outgrow this vast
+      Mausoleum, and cast from him the material Creation as an integument too
+      narrow for his insolent Mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Dissatisfaction</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For one thing I hate Spiders&mdash;I dislike all kinds of Insects. Their
+      cold intelligence, their empty, stereotyped, unremitted industry repel me.
+      And I am not altogether happy about the future of the Human Race; when I
+      think of the slow refrigeration of the Earth, the Sun's waning, and the
+      ultimate, inevitable collapse of the Solar System, I have grave
+      misgivings. And all the books I have read and forgotten-the thought that
+      my mind is really nothing but a sieve&mdash;this, too, at times
+      disheartens me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>A Fancy</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      More than once, though, I have pleased myself with the notion that
+      somewhere there is good Company which will like this little Book&mdash;these
+      Thoughts (if I may call them so) dipped up from that phantasmagoria or
+      phosphorescence which, by some unexplained process of combustion, flickers
+      over the large lump of soft gray matter in the bowl of my skull.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>They</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Their taste is exquisite; They live in Georgian houses, in a world of
+      ivory and precious china, of old brickwork and stone pilasters. In white
+      drawing rooms I see Them, or on blue, bird-haunted lawns. They talk
+      pleasantly of me, and their eyes watch me. From the diminished, ridiculous
+      picture of myself which the glass of the world gives me, I turn for
+      comfort, for happiness, to my image in the kindly mirror of those eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who are They? Where, in what paradise or palace, shall I ever find Them? I
+      may walk all the streets, ring all the door-bells of the World, but I
+      shall never find them. Yet nothing has value for me save In the crown of
+      Their approval; for Their coming&mdash;which will never be&mdash;I build
+      and plant, and for Them alone I secretly write this little Book, which
+      They will never read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>In the Pulpit</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Vicar had certain literary tastes; in his youth he had written an <i>Ode
+      to the Moon</i>; and he would speak of the difficulty he found in
+      composing his sermons, week after week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now I felt that if I composed and preached sermons, I should by no means
+      confine myself to the Vicar's threadbare subjects&mdash;should preach the
+      Wrath of God, and sound the Last Trump in the ears of my Hell-doomed
+      congregation, cracking the heavens and dissolving the earth with the
+      eclipses and thunders and earthquakes of the Day of Judgment. Then I might
+      refresh them with high and incomprehensible Doctrines, beyond the reach of
+      Reason&mdash;Predestination, Election, the Co-existences and Co-eternities
+      of the incomprehensible Triad. And with what a holy vehemence would I
+      exclaim and cry out against all forms of doctrinal Error&mdash;all the
+      execrable hypotheses of the great Heresiarchs! Then there would be many
+      ancient and learned and out-of-the-way Iniquities to denounce, and
+      splendid, neglected Virtues to inculcate&mdash;Apostolic Poverty, and
+      Virginity, that precious jewel, that fair garland, so prized in Heaven,
+      but so rare on earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For in the range of creeds and morals it is the highest peaks that shine
+      for me with a certain splendour: it is toward those radiant Alps that, if
+      I were a Clergyman, I would lead my flock to pasture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Human Ends</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I really was impressed, as we paced up and down the avenue, by the Vicar's
+      words and weighty, weighed advice. He spoke of the various professions;
+      mentioned contemporaries of his own who had achieved success: how one had
+      a Seat in Parliament, would be given a Seat in the Cabinet when his party
+      next came in; another was a Bishop with a Seat in the House of Lords; a
+      third was a Barrister who was soon, it was said, to be raised to the
+      Bench.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in spite of my good intentions, my real wish to find, before it is too
+      late, some career or other for myself (and the question is getting
+      serious), I am far too much at the mercy of ludicrous images. Front Seats,
+      Episcopal, Judicial, Parliamentary Benches&mdash;were all the ends then, I
+      asked my self, of serious, middle-aged ambition only things to sit on?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Lord Arden</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "If I were Lord Arden," said the Vicar, "I should shut up that great
+      House; it's too big&mdash;what can a young unmarried man...?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "If I were Lord Arden," said the Vicar's wife (and Mrs. La Mountain's tone
+      showed how much she disapproved of that young Nobleman), "if I were Lord
+      Arden, I should live there, and do my duty to my tenants and neighbours."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "If I were Lord Arden," I said; but then it flashed vividly into my mind,
+      suppose I really were this opulent young Lord? I quite forgot to whom I
+      was talking; my memory was occupied with the names of people who had been
+      famous for their enormous pleasures; who had filled their Palaces with
+      guilty revels, and built Pyramids, Obelisks, and half-acre Tombs, to
+      soothe their Pride. My mind kindled at the thought of these Audacities.
+      "If I were Lord Arden!" I cried....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Starry Heaven</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "But what are they really? What do they say they are?" the small young
+      lady asked me. We were looking up at the Stars, which were quivering that
+      night in splendid hosts above the lawns and trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So I tried to explain some of the views that have been held about them.
+      How people first of all had thought them mere candles set in the sky, to
+      guide their own footsteps when the Sun was gone; till wise men, sitting on
+      the Chaldean plains, and watching them with aged eyes, became impressed
+      with the solemn view that those still and shining lights were the
+      executioners of God's decrees, and irresistible instruments of His Wrath;
+      and that they moved fatally among their celestial Houses to ordain and set
+      out the fortunes and misfortunes of each race of newborn mortals. And so
+      it was believed that every man or woman had, from the cradle, fighting for
+      or against him or her, some great Star, Formalhaut, perhaps, Aldebaran,
+      Altaïr: while great Heroes and Princes were more splendidly attended, and
+      marched out to their forgotten battles with troops and armies of heavenly
+      Constellations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this noble old view was not believed in now; the Stars were no longer
+      regarded as malignant or beneficent Powers; and I explained how most
+      serious people thought that somewhere&mdash;though just where they did not
+      know&mdash;above the vault of Sky, was to be found the final home of
+      earnest men and women; where, as a reward for their right views and
+      conduct, they were to rejoice forever, wearing those diamonds of the
+      starry night arranged in glorious crowns. This notion, however, had been
+      disputed by Poets and Lovers: it was Love, according to these young
+      astronomers, that moved the Sun and other Stars; the Constellations being
+      heavenly palaces, where people who had adored each other were to meet and
+      live always together after Death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I spoke of the modern and real immensity of the unfathomed Skies. But
+      suddenly the vast meaning of my words rushed into my mind; I felt myself
+      dwindling, falling through the blue. And yet, in these silent seconds,
+      there thrilled through me in the cool sweet air and night no chill of
+      death or nothingness; but the taste and joy of this Earth, this
+      orchard-plot of earth, floating unknown, far away in unfathomed space,
+      with its Moon and meadows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0035" id="link2H_4_0035"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>My Map</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The "Known World" I called the map which I amused myself making for the
+      children's schoolroom. It included France, England, Italy, Greece, and all
+      the old shores of the Mediterranean; but the rest I marked "Unknown";
+      sketching into the East the doubtful realms of Ninus and Semiramis;
+      changing back Germany into the Hyrcanian Forest; and drawing pictures of
+      the supposed inhabitants of these unexplored regions, Dog-Apes, Satyrs,
+      Cannibals, and Misanthropes, Cimmerians involved in darkness, Amazons, and
+      Headless Men. And all around the Map I coiled the coils, and curled the
+      curling waves of the great Sea <i>Oceanum</i>, with the bursting cheeks of
+      the four Winds, blowing from the four imagined hinges of the Universe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0036" id="link2H_4_0036"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Snob</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As I paced in fine company on that Terrace, I felt chosen, exempt, and
+      curiously happy. There was a glamour in the air, a something in the
+      special flavour of that moment that was like the consciousness of
+      Salvation, or the smell of ripe peaches on a sunny wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know what you're going to call me, Reader. But I am not to be bullied
+      and abashed by words. And after all, why not let oneself be dazzled and
+      enchanted? Are not Illusions pleasant, and is this a world in which
+      Romance hangs on every tree?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And how about your own life? Is that, then, so full of golden visions?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0037" id="link2H_4_0037"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Companions</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Dearest, prettiest, and sweetest of my retinue, who gather with delicate
+      industry bits of silk and down from the bleak world to make the soft nest
+      of my fatuous repose; who ever whisper honied words in my ear, or trip
+      before me holding up deceiving mirrors&mdash;is it Hope, or is it not
+      rather Vanity, that I love the best?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0038" id="link2H_4_0038"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Edification</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "I must really improve my Mind," I tell myself, and once more begin to
+      patch and repair that crazy structure. So I toil and toil on at the vain
+      task of edification, though the wind tears off the tiles, the floors give
+      way, the ceilings fall, strange birds build untidy nests in the rafters,
+      and owls hoot and laugh in the tumbling chimneys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0039" id="link2H_4_0039"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Rose</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The old lady had always been proud of the great rose-tree in her garden,
+      and was fond of telling how it had grown from a cutting she had brought
+      years before from Italy, when she was first married. She and her husband
+      had been travelling back in their carriage from Rome (it was before the
+      time of railways), and on a bad piece of road south of Siena they had
+      broken down, and had been forced to pass the night in a little house by
+      the roadside. The accommodation was wretched of course; she had spent a
+      sleepless night, and rising early had stood, wrapped up, at her window,
+      with the cool air blowing on her face, to watch the dawn. She could still,
+      after all these years, remember the blue mountains with the bright moon
+      above them, and how a far-off town on one of the peaks had gradually grown
+      whiter and whiter, till the moon faded, the mountains were touched with
+      the pink of the rising sun, and suddenly the town was lit as by an
+      illumination, one window after another catching and reflecting the sun's
+      beams, till at last the whole little city twinkled and sparkled up in the
+      sky like a nest of stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That morning, finding they would have to wait while their carriage was
+      being repaired, they had driven in a local conveyance up to the city on
+      the mountain, where they had been told they would find better quarters;
+      and there they had stayed two or three days. It was one of the miniature
+      Italian cities with a high church, a pretentious piazza, a few narrow
+      streets and little palaces, perched all compact and complete, on the top
+      of a mountain, within an enclosure of walls hardly larger than an English
+      kitchen garden. But it was full of life and noise, echoing all day and all
+      night with the sounds of feet and voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Café of the simple inn where they stayed was the meeting-place of the
+      notabilities of the little city; the <i>Sindaco</i>, the <i>avvocato</i>,
+      the doctor, and a few others; and among them they noticed a beautiful,
+      slim, talkative old man, with bright black eyes and snow-white hair&mdash;tail
+      and straight and still with the figure of a youth, although the waiter
+      told them with pride that the <i>Conte</i> was <i>molto vecchio</i>&mdash;would
+      in fact be eighty in the following year. He was the last of his family,
+      the waiter added&mdash;they had once been great and rich people&mdash;but
+      he had no descendants; in fact the waiter mentioned with complacency, as
+      if it were a story on which the locality prided itself, that the <i>Conte</i>
+      had been unfortunate in love, and had never married.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old gentleman, however, seemed cheerful enough; and it was plain that
+      he took an interest in the strangers, and wished to make their
+      acquaintance. This was soon effected by the friendly waiter; and after a
+      little talk the old man invited them to visit his villa and garden which
+      were just outside the walls of the town. So the next afternoon, when the
+      sun began to descend, and they saw in glimpses through doorways and
+      windows blue shadows beginning to spread over the brown mountains, they
+      went to pay their visit. It was not much of a place, a small, modernized
+      stucco villa, with a hot pebbly garden, and in it a stone basin with
+      torpid gold fish, and a statue of Diana and her hounds against the wall.
+      But what gave a glory to it was a gigantic rose-tree which clambered over
+      the house, almost smothering the windows, and filling the air with the
+      perfume of its sweetness. Yes, it was a fine rose, the <i>Conte</i> said
+      proudly when they praised it, and he would tell the Signora about it. And
+      as they sat there, drinking the wine he offered them, he alluded with the
+      cheerful indifference of old age to his love-affair, as though he took for
+      granted that they had heard of it already.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The lady lived across the valley there beyond that hill. I was a young
+      man then, for it was many years ago. I used to ride over to see her; it
+      was a long way, but I rode fast, for young men, as no doubt the Signora
+      knows, are impatient. But the lady was not kind, she would keep me
+      waiting, oh, for hours; and one day when I had waited very long I grew
+      very angry, and as I walked up and down in the garden where she had told
+      me she would see me, I broke one of her roses, broke a branch from it; and
+      when I saw what I had done, I hid it inside my coat&mdash;so&mdash;and
+      when I came home I planted it, and the Signora sees how it has grown. If
+      the Signora admires it, I must give her a cutting to plant also in her
+      garden; I am told the English have beautiful gardens that are green, and
+      not burnt with the sun like ours."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day, when their mended carriage had come up to fetch them, and
+      they were just starting to drive away from the inn, the <i>Conte's</i> old
+      servant appeared with the rose-cutting neatly wrapped up, and the
+      compliments and wishes for a <i>buon viaggio</i> from her master. The town
+      collected to see them depart, and the children ran after their carriage
+      through the gate of the little city. They heard a rush of feet behind them
+      for a few moments, but soon they were far down toward the valley; the
+      little town with all its noise and life was high above them on its
+      mountain peak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had planted the rose at home, where it had grown and flourished in a
+      wonderful manner, and every June the great mass of leaves and shoots still
+      broke out into a passionate splendour of scent and scarlet colour, as if
+      in its root and fibres there still burnt the anger and thwarted desire of
+      that Italian lover. Of course the old <i>Conte</i> must have died many
+      years ago; she had forgotten his name, and had even forgotten the name of
+      the mountain city that she had stayed in, after first seeing it twinkling
+      at dawn in the sky, like a nest of stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0040" id="link2H_4_0040"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Vicar of Lynch</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When I heard through country gossip of the strange happening at Lynch
+      which had caused so great a scandal, and led to the disappearance of the
+      deaf old Vicar of that remote village, I collected all the reports I could
+      about it, for I felt that at the centre of this uncomprehending talk and
+      wild anecdote there was something with more meaning than a mere sudden
+      outbreak of blasphemy and madness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It appeared that the old Vicar, after some years spent in the quiet
+      discharge of his parochial duties, had been noticed to become more and
+      more odd in his appearance and behaviour; and it was also said that he had
+      gradually introduced certain alterations into the Church services. These
+      had been vaguely supposed at the time to be of a High Church character,
+      but afterwards they were put down to a growing mental derangement, which
+      had finally culminated at that notorious Harvest Festival, when his career
+      as a clergyman of the Church of England had ended. On this painful
+      occasion the old man had come into church outlandishly dressed, and had
+      gone through a service with chanted gibberish and unaccustomed gestures,
+      and prayers which were unfamiliar to his congregation. There was also talk
+      of a woman's figure on the altar, which the Vicar had unveiled at a solemn
+      moment in this performance; and I also heard echo of other gossip&mdash;gossip
+      that was, however, authoritatively contradicted and suppressed as much as
+      possible&mdash;about the use of certain other symbols of a most unsuitable
+      kind. Then a few days after the old man had disappeared&mdash;some of the
+      neighbours believed that he was dead; some, that he was now shut up in an
+      asylum for the insane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the fantastic and almost incredible talk I listened to, but in
+      which, as I say, I found much more meaning than my neighbours. For one
+      thing, although they knew that the Vicar had come from Oxford to this
+      remote College living, they knew nothing of his work and scholarly
+      reputation in that University, and none of them had probably ever heard of&mdash;much
+      less read&mdash;an important book which he had written, and which was the
+      standard work on his special subject. To them he was simply a deaf,
+      eccentric, and solitary clergyman; and I think I was the only person in
+      the neighbourhood who had conversed with him on the subject concerning
+      which he was the greatest living authority in England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For I had seen the old man once&mdash;curiously enough at the time of a
+      Harvest Festival, though it was some years before the one which had led to
+      his disappearance. Bicycling one day over the hills, I had ridden down
+      into a valley of cornfields, and then, passing along an unfenced road that
+      ran across a wide expanse of stubble, I came, after getting off to open
+      three or four gates, upon a group of thatched cottages, with a little,
+      unrestored Norman church standing among great elms, I left my bicycle and
+      walked through the churchyard, and as I went into the church, through its
+      deeply-recessed Norman doorway, a surprisingly pretty sight met my eyes.
+      The dim, cool, little interior was set out and richly adorned with an
+      abundance of fruit and vegetables, yellow gourds, apples and plums and
+      golden wheat sheaves, great loaves of bread, and garlands of September
+      flowers. A shabby-looking old clergyman was standing on the top of a
+      step-ladder, finishing the decorations, when I entered. As soon as he saw
+      me he came down, and I spoke to him, praising the decorations, and raising
+      my voice a little, for I noticed that he was somewhat deaf. We talked of
+      the Harvest Festival, and as I soon perceived that I was talking with a
+      man of books and University education, I ventured to hint at what had
+      vividly impressed me in that old, gaudily-decorated church&mdash;its pagan
+      character, as if it were a rude archaic temple in some corner of the
+      antique world, which had been adorned, two thousand years ago, by pious
+      country folk for some local festival. The old clergyman was not in the
+      least shocked by my remark; it seemed indeed rather to please him; there
+      was, he agreed, something of a pagan character in the modern Harvest
+      Festival&mdash;it was no doubt a bit of the old primitive Vegetation
+      Ritual, the old Religion of the soil; a Festival, which, like so many
+      others, had not been destroyed by Christianity, but absorbed into it, and
+      given a new meaning. "Indeed," he added, talking on as if the subject
+      interested him, and expressing himself with a certain donnish carefulness
+      of speech that I found pleasant to listen to, "the Harvest Festival is
+      undoubtedly a survival of the prehistoric worship of that Corn Goddess
+      who, in classical times, was called Demeter and Ioulo and Ceres, but whose
+      cult as an Earth-Mother and Corn-Spirit is of much greater antiquity. For
+      there is no doubt that this Vegetation Spirit has been worshipped from the
+      earliest times by agricultural peoples; the wheat fields and ripe harvests
+      being naturally suggestive of the presence amid the corn of a kindly
+      Being, who, in return for due rites and offerings, will vouchsafe
+      nourishing rains and golden harvests." He mentioned the references in
+      Virgil, and the description in Theocritus of a Sicilian Harvest Festival&mdash;these
+      were no doubt familiar to me; but if I was interested in the subject, I
+      should find, he said, much more information collected in a book which he
+      had written, but of which I had probably never heard, about the Vegetation
+      Deities in Greek Religion. As it happened I knew the book, and felt now
+      much interested in my chance meeting with the distinguished author; and
+      after expressing this as best I could, I rode off, promising to visit him
+      again. This promise I was never able to fulfil; but when afterwards, on my
+      return to the neighbourhood, I heard of that unhappy scandal, my memory of
+      this meeting and our talk enabled me to form a theory as to what had
+      really happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed plain to me that the change had been too violent for this
+      elderly scholar, taken from his books and college rooms and set down in
+      the solitude of this remote valley, amid the richness and living sap of
+      Nature. The gay spectacle, right under his old eyes, of growing shoots and
+      budding foliage, of blossoming and flowering, and the ripening of fruits
+      and crops, had little by little (such was my theory) unhinged his brains.
+      More and more his thoughts had come to dwell, not on the doctrines of the
+      Church in which he had long ago taken orders, but on the pagan rites which
+      had formed his life-long study, and which had been the expression of a
+      life not unlike the agricultural life amid which he now found himself
+      living. So as his derangement grew upon him in his solitude, he had
+      gradually transformed, with a maniac's cunning, the Christian services,
+      and led his little congregation, all unknown to themselves, back toward
+      their ancestral worship of the Corn-Goddess. At last he had thrown away
+      all disguise, and had appeared as a hierophant of Demeter, dressed in a
+      fawn skin, with a crown of poplar leaves, and pedantically carrying the
+      mystic basket and the winnowing fan appropriate to these mysteries. The
+      wheaten posset he offered the shocked communicants belonged to these also,
+      and the figure of a woman on the altar was of course the holy Wheatsheaf,
+      whose unveiling was the culminating point in that famous ritual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is much to be regretted that I could not recover full and more exact
+      details of that celebration in which this great scholar had probably
+      embodied his mature knowledge concerning a subject which has puzzled
+      generations of students. But what powers of careful observation could one
+      expect from a group of labourers and small farmers? Some of the things
+      that reached my ears I refused to believe&mdash;the mention of pig's blood
+      for instance, and especially the talk of certain grosser symbols, which
+      the choir boys, it was whispered, had carried about the church in
+      ceremonious procession. Village people have strange imaginations; and to
+      this event, growing more and more monstrous as they talked it over, they
+      must themselves have added this grotesque detail. However, I have written
+      to consult an Oxford authority on this interesting point, and he has been
+      kind enough to explain at length that although at the <i>Haloa</i>, or
+      winter festival of the Corn-Goddess, and also at the <i>Chloeia</i>, or
+      festival in early spring, some symbolization of the reproductive powers of
+      Nature would be proper and appropriate, it would have been quite out of
+      place at the <i>Thalysia</i>, or autumn festival of thanksgiving. I feel
+      certain that a solecism of this nature&mdash;the introduction into a
+      particular rite of features not sanctioned by the texts&mdash;would have
+      seemed a shocking thing, even to the unhinged mind of one who had always
+      been so careful a scholar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0041" id="link2H_4_0041"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Tu Quoque Fontium</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Just to sit in the Sun, to bask like an animal in its heat&mdash;this is
+      one of my country recreations. And often I reflect what a thing after all
+      it is still to be alive and sitting here, above all the buried people of
+      the world, in the kind and famous Sunshine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond the orchard there is a place where the stream, hurrying out from
+      under a bridge, makes for itself a quiet pool. A beech-tree upholds its
+      green light over the blue water; and there, when I have grown weary of the
+      sun, the great glaring indiscriminating Sun, I can shade myself and read
+      my book. And listening to this water's pretty voices I invent for it
+      exquisite epithets, calling it <i>silver-clean</i> or <i>moss-margined</i>
+      or <i>nymph-frequented</i>, and idly promise to place it among the learned
+      fountains and pools of the world, making of it a cool green thought for
+      English exiles in the dust and glare of Eastern deserts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0042" id="link2H_4_0042"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Spider</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a
+      waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full
+      of floating froth and refuse?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on
+      leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and
+      dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence,
+      sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0043" id="link2H_4_0043"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <i>"Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: Through spacious streets conduct
+      thy bard along."</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gay's <i>Trivia, or New Art of Walking Streets of London.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0044" id="link2H_4_0044"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>L'oiseau Bleu</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      What is it, I have more than once asked myself, what is it that I am
+      looking for in my walks about London? Sometimes it seems to me as if I
+      were following a Bird, a bright Bird that sings sweetly as it floats about
+      from one place to another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I find myself however among persons of middle age and settled
+      principles, see them moving regularly to their offices&mdash;what keeps
+      them going? I ask myself. And I feel ashamed of myself and my Bird.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is though a Philosophic Doctrine&mdash;I studied it at College, and
+      I know that many serious people believe it&mdash;which maintains that all
+      men, in spite of appearances and pretensions, all live alike for Pleasure.
+      This theory certainly brings portly, respected persons very near to me.
+      Indeed with a sense of low complicity I have sometimes followed and
+      watched a Bishop. Was he too on the hunt for Pleasure, solemnly pursuing
+      his Bird?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0045" id="link2H_4_0045"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>At The Bank</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Entering the Bank in a composed manner, I drew a cheque and handed it to
+      the cashier through the grating. Then I eyed him narrowly. Would not that
+      astute official see that I was only posing as a Real Person? No; he calmly
+      opened a little drawer, took out some real sovereigns, counted them
+      carefully, and handed them to me in a brass-tipped shovel. I went away
+      feeling I had perpetrated a delightful fraud. I had got some of the gold
+      of the actual world!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet now and then, at the sight of my name on a visiting card, or of my
+      face photographed in a group among other faces, or when I see a letter
+      addressed in my hand, or catch the sound of my own voice, I grow shy in
+      the presence of a mysterious Person who is myself, is known by my name,
+      and who apparently does exist. Can it be possible that I am as real as any
+      one else, and that all of us&mdash;the cashier and banker at the Bank, the
+      King on his throne&mdash;all feel ourselves like ghosts and goblins in
+      this authentic world?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0046" id="link2H_4_0046"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Mammon</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Moralists and Church Fathers have named it the root of all Evil, the
+      begetter of hate and bloodshed, the sure cause of the soul's damnation. It
+      has been called "trash," "muck," "dunghill excrement," by grave authors.
+      The love of it is denounced in all Sacred Writings; we find it reprehended
+      on Chaldean bricks, and in the earliest papyri. Buddha, Confucius, Christ,
+      set their faces against it; and they have been followed in more modern
+      times by beneficed Clergymen, Sunday School Teachers, and the leaders of
+      the Higher Thought. But have the condemnations of all the ages done
+      anything to tarnish that bright lustre? Men dig for it ever deeper into
+      the earth's intestines, travel in search of it farther and farther to
+      arctic and unpleasant regions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In spite of all my moral reading, I must confess that I like to have some
+      of this gaudy substance in my pocket. Its presence cheers and comforts me,
+      diffuses a genial warmth through my body. My eyes rejoice in the shine of
+      it; its clinquant sound is music in my ears. Since I then am in his paid
+      service, and reject none of the doles of his bounty, I too dwell in the
+      House of Mammon. I bow before the Idol, and taste the unhallowed ecstasy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How many Altars have been overthrown, and how many Theologies and heavenly
+      Dreams have had their bottoms knocked out of them, while He has sat there,
+      a great God, golden and adorned, and secure on His unmoved throne?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0047" id="link2H_4_0047"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>I See the World</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "But you go nowhere, see nothing of the world," my cousins said. Now
+      though I do go sometimes to the parties to which I am now and then
+      invited, I find, as a matter of fact, that I get really much more pleasure
+      by looking in at windows, and have a way of my own of seeing the World.
+      And of summer evenings, when motors hurry through the late twilight, and
+      the great houses take on airs of inscrutable expectation, I go owling out
+      through the dusk; and wandering toward the West, lose my way in unknown
+      streets&mdash;an unknown City of revels. And when a door opens and a
+      bediamonded Lady moves to her motor over carpets unrolled by powdered
+      footmen, I can easily think her some great Courtezan, or some
+      half-believed Duchess, hurrying to card-tables and lit candles and strange
+      scenes of joy. I like to see that there are still splendid people on this
+      flat earth; and at dances, standing in the street with the crowd, and
+      stirred by the music, the lights, the rushing sound of voices, I think the
+      Ladies as beautiful as Stars who move up those lanes of light past our
+      rows of vagabond faces; the young men look like Lords in novels; and if
+      (it has once or twice happened) people I know go by me, they strike me as
+      changed and rapt beyond my sphere. And when on hot nights windows are left
+      open, and I can look in at Dinner Parties, as I peer through lace curtains
+      and window-flowers at the silver, the women's shoulders, the shimmer of
+      their jewels, and the divine attitudes of their heads as they lean and
+      listen, I imagine extraordinary intrigues and unheard of wines and
+      passions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0048" id="link2H_4_0048"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Social Success</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The servant gave me my coat and hat, and in a glow of self-satisfaction I
+      walked out into the night. "A delightful evening," I reflected, "the
+      nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and French philosophy
+      impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a pig squealing."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But soon after, "God, it's awful," I muttered, "I wish I were dead."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0049" id="link2H_4_0049"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Apotheosis</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But Oh, those heavenly moments when I feel this trivial universe too small
+      to contain my Attributes; when a sense of the divine Ipseity invades me;
+      when I know that my voice is the voice of Truth, and my umbrella God's
+      umbrella!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0050" id="link2H_4_0050"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Spring in London</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      London seemed last winter like an underground city; as if its low sky were
+      the roof of a cave, and its murky day a light such as one reads of in
+      countries beneath the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet the natural sunlight sometimes shone there; white clouds voyaged
+      in the blue sky; the interminable multitudes of roofs were washed with
+      silver by the Moon, or cloaked with a mantle of new-fallen snow. And the
+      coming of Spring to London was to me not unlike the descent of the
+      maiden-goddess into Death's Kingdoms, when pink almond blossoms blew about
+      her in the gloom, and those shadowy people were stirred with faint
+      longings for meadows and the shepherd's life. Nor was there anything more
+      virginal and fresh in wood or orchard than the shimmer of young foliage,
+      which, in May, dimmed with delicate green all the smoke-blackened London
+      trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0051" id="link2H_4_0051"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Fashion Plates</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I like loitering at the bookstalls, looking in at the windows of
+      printshops, and romancing over the pictures I see of shepherdesses and
+      old-fashioned Beauties. Tall and slim and crowned with plumes in one
+      period, in another these Ladies become as wide-winged as butterflies, or
+      float, large, balloon-like visions, down summer streets. And yet in all
+      shapes they have always (I tell myself) created thrilling effects of
+      beauty, and waked in the breasts of modish young men ever the same
+      charming Emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then I have questioned this. Is the emotion always precisely the same?
+      Is it true to say that the human heart remains quite unchanged beneath all
+      the changing fashions of frills and ruffles? In this elegant and cruel
+      Sentiment, I rather fancy that colour and shape do make a difference. I
+      have a notion that about 1840 was the Zenith, the Meridian Hour, the
+      Golden Age of the Passion. Those tight-waisted, whiskered Beaux, those
+      crinolined Beauties, adored one another, I believe, with a leisure, a
+      refinement, and dismay not quite attainable at other dates.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0052" id="link2H_4_0052"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Mental Vice</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There are certain hackneyed Thoughts that will force them-selves on me; I
+      find my mind, especially in hot weather, infested and buzzed about by
+      moral Platitudes. "That shows&mdash;" I say to myself, or, "How true it is&mdash;"
+      or, "I really ought to have known!" The sight of a large clock sets me off
+      into musings on the flight of Time; a steamer on the Thames or lines of
+      telegraph inevitably suggest the benefits of Civilization, man's triumph
+      over Nature, the heroism of Inventors, the courage, amid ridicule and
+      poverty, of Stephenson and Watt. Like faint, rather unpleasant smells,
+      these thoughts lurk about railway stations. I can hardly post a letter
+      without marvelling at the excellence and accuracy of the Postal System.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the pride in the British Constitution and British Freedom, which
+      comes over me when I see, even in the distance, the Towers of Westminster
+      Palace&mdash;that Mother of Parliaments&mdash;it is not much comfort that
+      this should be chastened, as I walk down the Embankment, by the sight of
+      Cleopatra's Needle, and the Thought that it will no doubt witness the Fall
+      of the British, as it has that of other Empires, remaining to point its
+      Moral, as old as Egypt, to Antipodeans musing on the dilapidated bridges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am sometimes afraid of finding that there is a moral for everything;
+      that the whole great frame of the Universe has a key, like a box; has been
+      contrived and set going by a well-meaning but humdrum Eighteenth-century
+      Creator. It would be a kind of Hell, surely, a world in which everything
+      could be at once explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated
+      with Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, industrious bees, and
+      preaching animals. The benefits of Civilization cloy me. I have seen
+      enough shining of the didactic Sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So gazing up on hot summer nights at the London stars, I cool my thoughts
+      with a vision of the giddy, infinite, meaningless waste of Creation, the
+      blazing Suns, the Planets and frozen Moons, all crashing blindly forever
+      across the void of space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0053" id="link2H_4_0053"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Organ of Life</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Almost always In London&mdash;in the congregated uproar of streets, or in
+      the noise that drifts through wails and windows&mdash;you can hear the
+      hackneyed melancholy of street music; a music which sounds like the actual
+      voice of the human Heart, singing the lost joys, the regrets, the loveless
+      lives of the people who blacken the pavements, or jolt along on the
+      busses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Speak to me kindly," the hand-organ implores; "I'm all alone!" it screams
+      amid the throng; "thy Vows are all broken," it laments in dingy
+      courtyards, "And light is thy Fame." And of hot summer afternoons, the Cry
+      for Courage to Remember, or Calmness to Forget, floats in with the smell
+      of paint and asphalt&mdash;faint and sad&mdash;through open office
+      windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0054" id="link2H_4_0054"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Humiliation</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "My own view is," I began, but no one listened. At the next pause, "I
+      always say," I remarked, but again the loud talk went on. Someone told a
+      story. When the laughter had ended, "I often think&mdash;"; but looking
+      round the table I could catch no friendly or attentive eye. It was
+      humiliating, but more humiliating the thought that Sophocles and Goethe
+      would have always commanded attention, while the lack of it would not have
+      troubled Spinoza or Abraham Lincoln.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0055" id="link2H_4_0055"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Green Ivory</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      What a bore it is, waking up in the morning always the same person. I wish
+      I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big, bushy eyebrows and a Message
+      for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should like to be refined and melancholy, the victim of a hopeless
+      passion; to love in the old, stilted way, with impossible Adoration and
+      Despair under the pale-faced Moon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wish I could get up; I wish I were the world's greatest Violinist. I
+      wish I had lots of silver, and first Editions, and green ivory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0056" id="link2H_4_0056"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>In The Park</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "Yes," I said one afternoon in the Park, as I looked rather contemptuously
+      at the people of Fashion, moving slow and well-dressed in the sunshine,
+      "but how about the others, the Courtiers and Beauties and Dandies of the
+      past? They wore fine costumes, and glittered for their hour in the summer
+      air. What has become of them?" I somewhat rhetorically asked. They were
+      all dead now. Their day was over. They were cold in their graves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I thought of those severe spirits who, in garrets far from the Park
+      and Fashion, had scorned the fumes and tinsel of the noisy World.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, good Heavens! these severe spirits were, it occurred to me, all, as a
+      matter of fact, quite as dead as the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0057" id="link2H_4_0057"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Correct</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I am sometimes visited by a suspicion that everything isn't quite all
+      right with the Righteous; that the Moral Law speaks in muffled and dubious
+      tones to those who listen most scrupulously for its dictates. I feel sure
+      I have detected a look of doubt and misgiving in the eyes of its earnest
+      upholders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there is no such shadow or cloud on the faces in Club windows, or in
+      the eyes of drivers of four-in-hands, or of fashionable young men walking
+      down Piccadilly. For these live by a Rule which has not been drawn down
+      from far-off and questionable skies, and needs no sanction; what they do
+      is Correct, and that is all. Correctly dressed from head to foot, they
+      pass, with correct speech and thoughts and gestures, correctly across the
+      roundness of the Earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0058" id="link2H_4_0058"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>"Where Do I Come In?"</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When I read in the <i>Times</i> about India and all its problems and
+      populations; when I look at the letters in large type of important
+      personages, and find myself face to face with the Questions, Movements,
+      and great Activities of the Age, "Where do I come in?" I ask myself
+      uneasily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then in the great <i>Times</i>-reflected world I find the corner where I
+      play my humble but necessary part. For I am one of the unpraised,
+      unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be a bankrupt science.
+      It is we who are born, who marry, who die, in constant ratios; who
+      regularly lose so many umbrellas, post just so many unaddressed letters
+      every year. And there are enthusiasts among us who, without the least
+      thought of their own convenience, allow omnibuses to run over them; or
+      throw themselves month by month, in fixed numbers, from the London
+      bridges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0059" id="link2H_4_0059"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Microbes</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But how Is one to keep free from those mental microbes that worm-eat
+      people's brains&mdash;those Theories and Diets and Enthusiasms and
+      infectious Doctrines that we are always liable to catch from what seem the
+      most innocuous contacts? People go about laden with germs; they breathe
+      creeds and convictions on you whenever they open their mouths. Books and
+      newspapers are simply creeping with them&mdash;the monthly Reviews seem to
+      have room for nothing else. Wherewithal then shall a young man cleanse his
+      way; and how shall he keep his mind immune to Theosophical speculations,
+      and novel schemes of Salvation?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Can he ever be sure that he won't be suddenly struck down by the fever of
+      Funeral, or of Spelling Reform, or take to his bed with a new Sex Theory?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But is this struggle for a healthy mind in a maggoty universe really after
+      all worth it? Are there not soporific dreams and sweet deliriums more
+      soothing than Reason? If Transmigration can make clear the dark Problem of
+      Evil; if Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy can free us from the dominion of Death; if
+      the belief that Bacon wrote Shakespeare gives a peace that the world
+      cannot give, why pedantically reject such kindly solace? Why not be led
+      with the others by still waters, and be made to lie down in green
+      pastures?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0060" id="link2H_4_0060"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Quest</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "We walk alone in the world," the Moralist, at the end of his essay on
+      Ideal Friendship, writes somewhat sadly, "Friends such as we desire are
+      dreams and fables," Yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.
+      But what awful things happen to us? what snubs, what set-downs we
+      experience, what shames and disillusions. We can never really tell what
+      these new unknown persons may do to us. Sometimes they seem nice, and then
+      begin to talk like gramophones. Sometimes they grab at us with moist
+      hands, or breathe hotly on our necks, or make awful confidences, or drench
+      us from sentimental slop-pails. And too often, among the thoughts in the
+      loveliest heads, we come on nests of woolly caterpillars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet we brush our hats, pull on our gloves, and go out and ring
+      door-bells.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0061" id="link2H_4_0061"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Kaleidoscope</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I find in my mind, in its miscellany of ideas and musings, a curious
+      collection of little landscapes and pictures, shining and fading for no
+      reason. Sometimes they are views in no way remarkable-the corner of a
+      road, a heap of stones, an old gate. But there are many charming pictures,
+      too: as I read, between my eyes and book, the Moon sheds down on harvest
+      fields her chill of silver; I see autumnal avenues, with the leaves
+      falling, or swept in heaps; and storms blow among my thoughts, with the
+      rain beating forever on the fields. Then Winter's upward glare of snow
+      appears; or the pink and delicate green of Spring in the windy sunshine;
+      or cornfields and green waters, and youths bathing in Summer's golden
+      heats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as I walk about, certain places haunt me: a cathedral rises above a
+      dark blue foreign town, the colour of ivory in the sunset light; now I
+      find myself in a French garden full of lilacs and bees, and shut-in
+      sunshine, with the Mediterranean lounging and washing outside its walls;
+      now in a little college library, with busts, and the green reflected light
+      of Oxford lawns&mdash;and again I hear the bells, reminding me of the
+      familiar Oxford hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0062" id="link2H_4_0062"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Oxford Street</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and
+      voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the
+      crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my
+      thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for
+      the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share
+      in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious faces. And as I
+      listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed
+      into something ancient and dissonant and sad&mdash;into the turbid flow of
+      that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless
+      cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the
+      farther shore, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace
+      beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. <i>Om Mani padme hum</i>&mdash;I
+      murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the
+      Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that
+      suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the
+      mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled
+      onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and
+      lust, and sorrow, and anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0063" id="link2H_4_0063"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Beauty</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Among all the ugly mugs of the world we see now and then a face made after
+      the divine pattern. Then, a wonderful thing happens to us; the Blue Bird
+      sings, the golden Splendour shines, and for a queer moment everything
+      seems meaningless save our impulse to follow those fair forms, to follow
+      them to the clear Paradises they promise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Plato assures us that these moments are not (as we are apt to think them)
+      mere blurs and delusions of the senses, but divine revelations; that in a
+      lovely face we see imaged, as in a mirror, the Absolute Beauty&mdash;; it
+      is Reality, flashing on us in the cave where we dwell amid shadows and
+      darkness. Therefore we should follow these fair forms, and their shining
+      footsteps will lead us upward to the highest heaven of Wisdom. The Poets,
+      too, keep chanting this great doctrine of Beauty in grave notes to their
+      golden strings. Its music floats up through the skies so sweet, so
+      strange, that the very Angels seem to lean from their stars to listen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, O Plato, O Shelley, O Angels of Heaven, what scrapes you do get us
+      into!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0064" id="link2H_4_0064"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Power of Words</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I thanked the club porter who helped me into my coat, and stepped out
+      lightly into the vastness and freshness of the Night. And as I walked
+      along my eyes were dazzling with the glare I had left; I still seemed to
+      hear the sound of my speech, and the applause and laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when I looked up at the Stars, the great Stars that bore me company,
+      streaming over the dark houses as I moved, I felt that I was the Lord of
+      Life; the mystery and disquieting meaninglessness of existence&mdash;the
+      existence of other people, and of my own, were solved for me now. As for
+      the Earth, hurrying beneath my feet, how bright was its journey; how
+      shining the goal toward which it went swinging&mdash;you might really say
+      leaping&mdash;through the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I must tell the Human Race of this!" I heard my voice; saw my prophetic
+      gestures, as I expounded the ultimate meaning of existence to the white,
+      rapt faces of Humanity. Only to find the words&mdash;that troubled me;
+      were there then no words to describe this Vision&mdash;divine&mdash;intoxicating?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then the Word struck me; the Word people would use. I stopped in the
+      street; my Soul was silenced like a bell that snarls at a jarring touch. I
+      stood there awhile and meditated on language, its perfidious meanness, the
+      inadequacy, the ignominy of our vocabulary, and how Moralists have spoiled
+      our words by distilling into them, as into little vials of poison, all
+      their hatred of human joy. Away with that police-force of brutal words
+      which bursts in on our best moments and arrests our finest feelings! This
+      music within me, large, like the song of the stars&mdash;like a Glory of
+      Angels singing&mdash;"No one has any right to say I am drunk!" I shouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0065" id="link2H_4_0065"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Self-Analysis</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, aren't they odd, the thoughts that float through one's mind for no
+      reason? But why not be frank&mdash;I suppose the best of us are shocked at
+      times by the things we find ourselves thinking. Don't you agree," I went
+      on, not noticing (until it was too late) that all other conversation had
+      ceased, and the whole dinner-party was listening, "don't you agree that
+      the oddest of all are the improper thoughts that come into one's head&mdash;the
+      unspeakable words I mean, and Obscenities?" When I remember that remark, I
+      hasten to enlarge my mind with ampler considerations. I think of Space,
+      and the unimportance in its unmeasured vastness, of our toy solar system;
+      I lose myself in speculations on the lapse of Time, reflecting how at the
+      best our human life on this minute and perishing planet is as brief as a
+      dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0066" id="link2H_4_0066"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Voice of the World</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "And what are you doing now?" The question of these school contemporaries
+      of mine, and their greeting the other day in Piccadilly (I remember how
+      shabby I felt as I stood talking to them)&mdash;for a day or two that
+      question haunted me. And behind their well-bred voices I seemed to hear
+      the voice of Schoolmasters and Tutors, of the Professional Classes, and
+      indeed of all the world. What, as a plain matter of fact, was I doing, how
+      did I spend my days? The life-days which I knew were numbered, and which
+      were described in sermons and on tombstones as so irrevocable, so
+      melancholy-brief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I decided to change my life. I too would be somebody in my time and age;
+      my contemporaries should treat me as an important person. I began thinking
+      of my endeavours, my studies by the midnight lamp, my risings at dawn for
+      stolen hours of self-improvement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But alas, the day, the little day, was enough just then. It somehow seemed
+      enough, just to be alive in the Spring, with the young green of the trees,
+      the smell of smoke in the sunshine; I loved the old shops and books, the
+      uproar darkening and brightening in the shabby daylight. Just a run of
+      good-looking faces&mdash;and I was always looking for faces&mdash;would
+      keep me amused. And London was but a dim-lit stage on which I could play
+      in fancy any part I liked. I woke up in the morning like Byron to find
+      myself famous; I was drawn like Chatham to St. Paul's, amid the cheers of
+      the Nation, and sternly exclaimed with Cromwell, "Take away that bauble,"
+      as I sauntered past the Houses of Parliament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0067" id="link2H_4_0067"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>And Anyhow</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      And anyhow, soon, so soon (in only seven million years or thereabouts the
+      Encyclopaedia said) this Earth would grow cold, all human activities end,
+      and the last wretched mortals freeze to death in the dim rays of the dying
+      Sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0068" id="link2H_4_0068"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Drawbacks</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I should be all right.... If it weren't for these sudden visitations of
+      Happiness, these downpourings of Heaven's blue, little invasions of
+      Paradise, or waftings to the Happy Islands, or whatever you may call these
+      disconcerting Moments, I should be like everybody else, and as blameless a
+      rate-payer as any in our Row.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0069" id="link2H_4_0069"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Talk</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Once in a while, when doors are closed and curtains drawn on a group of
+      free spirits, the miracle happens, and Good Talk begins. 'Tis a sudden
+      illumination&mdash;the glow, it may be of sanctified candles, or, more
+      likely, the blaze around a cauldron of gossip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is there an ecstasy or any intoxication like it? Oh? to talk, to talk
+      people into monsters, to talk one's self out of one's clothes, to talk God
+      from His heaven, and turn everything in the world into a bright tissue of
+      phrases!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These Pentecosts and outpourings of the spirit can only occur very rarely,
+      or the Universe itself would be soon talked out of existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0070" id="link2H_4_0070"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Church of England</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I have my Anglican moments; and as I sat there that Sunday afternoon, in
+      the Palladian interior of the London Church, and listened to the
+      unexpressive voices chanting the correct service, I felt a comfortable
+      assurance that we were in no danger of being betrayed into any unseemly
+      manifestations of religious fervour. We had not gathered together at that
+      performance to abase ourselves with furious hosannas before any dark
+      Creator of an untamed Universe, no Deity of freaks and miracles and
+      sinister hocus-pocus; but to pay our duty to a highly respected Anglican
+      First Cause&mdash;undemonstrative, gentlemanly and conscientious&mdash;whom,
+      without loss of self-respect, we could sincerely and decorously praise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0071" id="link2H_4_0071"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Misgiving</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We were talking of people, and a name familiar to us all was mentioned. We
+      paused and looked at each other; then soon, by means of anecdotes and
+      clever touches, that personality was reconstructed, and seemed to appear
+      before us, large, pink, and life-like, and gave a comic sketch of itself
+      with appropriate poses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Of course," I said to myself, "this sort of thing never happens to me."
+      For the notion was quite unthinkable, the notion I mean of my own dear
+      image, called up like this without my knowledge, to turn my discreet way
+      of life into a cake-walk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0072" id="link2H_4_0072"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Sanctuaries</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      She said, "How small the world is after all!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought of China, of a holy mountain in the West of China, full of
+      legends and sacred trees and demon-haunted caves. It is always enveloped
+      in mountain mists; and in that white thick air I heard the faint sound of
+      bells, and the muffled footsteps of innumerable pilgrims, and the
+      reiterated mantra, <i>Nam-Mo, O-mi-to-Fo</i>, which they murmur as they
+      climb its slopes. High up among its temples and monasteries marched
+      processions of monks, with intoned services, and many prostrations, and
+      lighted candles that glimmer through the fog. There in their solemn
+      shrines stood the statues of the Arahats, and there, seated on his white
+      elephant, loomed immense and dim, the image of Amitabha, the Lord of the
+      Western Heavens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She said "Life is so complicated!" Climbing inaccessible cliffs of rock
+      and ice, I shut myself within a Tibetan monastery beyond the Himalayan
+      ramparts. I join with choirs of monks, intoning their deep sonorous dirges
+      and unintelligible prayers; I beat drums, I clash cymbals, and blow at
+      dawn from the Lamasery roofs conches, and loud discordant trumpets. And
+      wandering through those vast and shadowy halls, as I tend the butter-lamps
+      of the golden Buddhas, and watch the storms that blow across the barren
+      mountains, I taste an imaginary bliss, and then pass on to other scenes
+      and incarnations along the endless road that leads me to Nirvana.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But I do wish you would tell me what you really think?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fled to Africa, into the depths of the dark Ashanti forest. There, in
+      its gloomiest recesses, where the soil is stained with the blood of the
+      negroes He has eaten, dwells that monstrous Deity of human shape and red
+      colour, the great Fetish God, Sasabonsum. I like Sasabonsum: other Gods
+      are sometimes moved to pity and forgiveness, but to Him such weakness is
+      unknown. He is utterly and absolutely implacable; no gifts or prayers, no
+      holocausts of human victims can appease, or ever, for one moment,
+      propitiate Him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0073" id="link2H_4_0073"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Symptoms</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "But there are certain people I simply cannot stand. A dreariness and
+      sense of death come over me when I meet them&mdash;I really find it
+      difficult to breathe when they are in the room, as if they had pumped all
+      the air out of it. Wouldn't it be dreadful to produce that effect on
+      people! But they never seem to be aware of it. I remember once meeting a
+      famous Bore; I really must tell you about it, it shows the unbelievable
+      obtuseness of such people."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I told this and another story or two with great gusto, and talked on of my
+      experiences and sensations, till suddenly I noticed, in the appearance of
+      my charming neighbour, something&mdash;a slightly glazed look in her eyes,
+      a just perceptible irregularity in her breathing&mdash;which turned that
+      occasion for me into a kind of Nightmare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0074" id="link2H_4_0074"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Shadowed</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I sometimes feel a little uneasy about that imagined self of mine&mdash;the
+      Me of my daydreams&mdash;who leads a melodramatic life of his own, quite
+      unrelated to my real existence. So one day I shadowed him down the street.
+      He loitered along for a while, and then stood at a shop-window and dressed
+      himself out in a gaudy tie and yellow waistcoat. Then he bought a great
+      sponge and two stuffed birds and took them to lodgings, where he led for a
+      while a shady existence. Next he moved to a big house in Mayfair, and gave
+      grand dinner-parties, with splendid service and costly wines. His amorous
+      adventures in this region I pass over. He soon sold his house and horses,
+      gave up his motors, dismissed his retinue of servants, and went&mdash;saving
+      two young ladies from being run over on the way&mdash;to live a life of
+      heroic self-sacrifice among the poor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was beginning to feel encouraged about him, when in passing a
+      fishmonger's, he pointed at a great salmon and said, "I caught that fish."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0075" id="link2H_4_0075"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Incredible</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, but they were rather afraid of you."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Afraid of <i>me</i>?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, so one of them told me afterwards."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was fairly jiggered. If my personality can inspire fear or respect the
+      world must be a simpler place than I had thought it. Afraid of a shadow, a
+      poor make-believe like me? Are children more absurdly terrified by a
+      candle in a hollow turnip? Was Bedlam at full moon ever scared by anything
+      half so silly?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0076" id="link2H_4_0076"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Terror</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A pause suddenly fell on our conversation&mdash;one of those uncomfortable
+      lapses when we sit with fixed smiles, searching our minds for some remark
+      with which to fill up the unseasonable silence. It was only a moment&mdash;"But
+      suppose," I said to myself with horrible curiosity, "suppose none of us
+      had found a word to say, and we had gone on sitting in silence?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the dread of Something happening, Something unknown and awful, that
+      makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk from dying out. So
+      travellers at night in an unknown forest keep their fires ablaze, in fear
+      of Wild Beasts lurking ready in the darkness to leap upon them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0077" id="link2H_4_0077"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Pathos</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When winter twilight falls on my street with the rain, a sense of the
+      horrible sadness of life descends upon me. I think of drunken old women
+      who drown themselves because nobody loves them; I think of Napoleon at St.
+      Helena, and of Byron growing morose and fat in the enervating climate of
+      Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0078" id="link2H_4_0078"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Inconstancy</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The rose that one wears and throws away, the friend one forgets, the music
+      that passes&mdash;out of the well-known transitoriness of mortal things I
+      have made myself a maxim or precept to the effect that it is foolish to
+      look for one face, or to listen long for one voice, in a world that is
+      after all, as I know, full of enchanting voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But all the same, I can never quite forget the enthusiasm with which, as a
+      boy, I read the praises of Constancy and True Love, and the unchanged
+      Northern Star.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0079" id="link2H_4_0079"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Poplar</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There is a great tree in Sussex, whose cloud of thin foliage floats high
+      in the summer air. The thrush sings in it, and blackbirds, who fill the
+      late, decorative sunshine with a shimmer of golden sound. There the
+      nightingale finds her green cloister; and on those branches sometimes,
+      like a great fruit, hangs the lemon-coloured Moon. In the glare of August,
+      when all the world is faint with heat, there is always a breeze in those
+      cool recesses, always a noise, like the noise of water, among its lightly
+      hung leaves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the owner of this Tree lives in London, reading books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0080" id="link2H_4_0080"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>On the Doorstep</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I rang the bell as of old; as of old I gazed at the great shining Door and
+      waited. But, alas! that flutter and beat of the wild heart, that delicious
+      doorstep Terror&mdash;it was gone; and with it dear, fantastic,
+      panic-stricken Youth had rung the bell, flitted round the corner and
+      vanished for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0081" id="link2H_4_0081"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Old Clothes</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Shabby old waistcoat, what made the heart beat that you used to cover?
+      Funny-shaped hat, where are the thoughts that once nested beneath you? Old
+      shoes, hurrying along what dim paths of the Past did I wear out your
+      sole-leather?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0082" id="link2H_4_0082"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Youth</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Oh dear, this living and eating and growing old; these doubts and aches in
+      the back, and want of interest in the Moon and Roses...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Am I the person who used to wake in the middle of the night and laugh with
+      the joy of living? Who worried about the existence of God, and danced with
+      young ladies till long after daybreak? Who sang "Auld Lang Syne" and
+      howled with sentiment, and more than once gazed at the summer stars
+      through a blur of great, romantic tears?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0083" id="link2H_4_0083"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Consolation</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The other day, depressed on the Underground, I tried to cheer myself by
+      thinking over the joys of our human lot. But there wasn't one of them for
+      which I seemed to care a hang&mdash;not Wine, nor Friendship, nor Eating,
+      nor Making Love, nor the Consciousness of Virtue. Was it worth while then
+      going up in a lift into a world that had nothing less trite to offer?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I thought of reading&mdash;the nice and subtle happiness of reading.
+      This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunished
+      vice, this selfish, serene, life-long intoxication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0084" id="link2H_4_0084"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Sir Eustace Carr</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When I read the news about Sir Eustace Carr in the morning paper, I was
+      startled, like everyone else who knew, if only by name this young man,
+      whose wealth and good looks, whose adventurous travels and whose brilliant
+      and happy marriage, had made of him an almost romantic figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every now and then one hears of some strange happening of this kind. But
+      they are acts so anomalous, in such startling contradiction to all our
+      usual ways and accepted notions of life and its value, that most of us are
+      willing enough to accept the familiar explanation of insanity, or any
+      other commonplace cause which may be alleged&mdash;financial trouble, or
+      some passionate entanglement, and the fear of scandal and exposure. And
+      then the Suicide is forgotten as soon as possible, and his memory shuffled
+      out of the way as something unpleasant to think of. But with a curiosity
+      that is perhaps a little morbid, I sometimes let my thoughts dwell on
+      these cases, wondering whether the dead man may not have carried to the
+      grave with him the secret of some strange perplexity, some passion or
+      craving or irresistible impulse, of which perhaps his intimates, and
+      certainly the coroner's jury, can have had no inkling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had never met or spoken to Sir Eustace Carr&mdash;the worlds we lived in
+      were very different&mdash;but I had read of his explorations in the East,
+      and of the curious tombs he had discovered&mdash;somewhere, was it not?&mdash;in
+      the Nile Valley. Then too it happened (and this was the main cause of my
+      interest) that at one time I had seen him more than once, under
+      circumstances that were rather unusual. And now I began to think of this
+      incident. In away it was nothing, and yet the impression haunted me that
+      it was somehow connected with this final act, for which no explanation,
+      beyond that of sudden mental derangement, had been offered. This
+      explanation did not seem to me wholly adequate, although it had been
+      accepted, I believe, both by his friends and the general public&mdash;and
+      with the more apparent reason on account of a strain of eccentricity,
+      amounting in some cases almost to insanity, which could be traced, it was
+      said, in his mother's family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I found it not difficult to revive with a certain vividness the memory of
+      those cold and rainy November weeks that I had happened to spend alone,
+      some years ago, in Venice, and of the churches which I had so frequently
+      haunted. Especially I remembered the great dreary church in the piazza
+      near my lodgings, into which I would often go on my way to my rooms in the
+      twilight. It was the season when all the Venice churches are draped in
+      black, and services for the dead are held in them at dawn and twilight;
+      and when I entered this Baroque interior, with its twisted columns and
+      volutes and high-piled, hideous tombs, adorned with skeletons and
+      allegorical figures and angels blowing trumpets&mdash;all so agitated, and
+      yet all so dead and empty and frigid&mdash;I would find the fantastic
+      darkness filled with glimmering candles, and kneeling figures, and the
+      discordant noise of chanting. There I would sit, while outside night fell
+      with the rain on Venice; the palaces and green canals faded into darkness,
+      and the great bells, swinging against the low sky, sent the melancholy
+      sound of their voices far over the lagoons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was here, in this church, that I used to see Sir Eustace Carr; would
+      generally find him in the same corner when I entered, and would sometimes
+      watch his face, until the ceremonious extinguishing of the candles, one by
+      one, left us in shadowy night. It was a handsome and thoughtful face, and
+      I remember more than once wondering what had brought him to Venice in that
+      unseasonable month, and why he came so regularly to this monotonous
+      service. It was as if some spell had drawn him; and now, with my curiosity
+      newly wakened, I asked myself what had been that spell? I also must have
+      been affected by it, for I had been there also in his uncommunicating
+      company. Here, I felt, was perhaps the answer to my question, the secret
+      of the enigma that puzzled me; and as I went over my memories of that
+      time, and revived its sombre and almost sinister fascination, I seemed to
+      see an answer looming before my imagination. But it was an answer, an
+      hypothesis or supposition, so fantastic, that my common sense could hardly
+      accept it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For I now saw that the spell which had been on us both at that time in
+      Venice had been nothing but the spell and tremendous incantation of the
+      Thought of Death. The dreary city with its decaying palaces and great
+      tomb-encumbered churches had really seemed, in those dark and desolate
+      weeks, to be the home and metropolis of the great King of Terrors; and the
+      services at dawn and twilight, with their prayers for the Dead, and
+      funereal candles, had been the chanted ritual of his worship. Now suppose
+      (such was the notion that held my imagination) suppose this spell, which I
+      had felt but for a time and dimly, should become to someone a real
+      obsession, casting its shadow more and more completely over a life
+      otherwise prosperous and happy, might not this be the clue to a history
+      like that of Sir Eustace Carr's&mdash;not only his interest in the buried
+      East, his presence at that time in Venice, but also his unexplained and
+      mysterious end?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Musing on this half-believed notion, I thought of the great personages and
+      great nations we read of in ancient history, who have seemed to live with
+      a kind of morbid pleasure in the shadow of this great Thought; who have
+      surrounded themselves with mementoes of Death, and hideous symbols of its
+      power, and who, like the Egyptians, have found their main interest, not in
+      the present, but in imaginary explorations of the unknown future; not on
+      the sunlit surface of this earth, but in the vaults and dwelling-places of
+      the Dead beneath it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since this preoccupation, this curiosity, this nostalgia, has exercised so
+      enormous a fascination in the past, I found it not impossible to imagine
+      some modern favourite of fortune falling a victim to this malady of the
+      soul; until at last, growing weary of other satisfactions, he might be
+      drawn to open for himself the dark portal and join the inhabitants of that
+      dim region, "Kings and Counsellors of the earth, Princes that had gold,
+      who filled their houses with silver." This, as I say, was the notion that
+      haunted me, the link my imagination forged between Sir Eustace Carr's
+      presence in that dark Venetian church, and his self-caused death some
+      years later. But whether it is really a clue to that unexplained mystery,
+      or whether it is nothing more than a somewhat sinister fancy, of course, I
+      cannot say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0085" id="link2H_4_0085"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Lord Mayor</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      An arctic wind was blowing; it cut through me as I stood there. The
+      boot-black was finishing his work and complaints.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But I should be 'appy, sir, if only I could make four bob a day," he
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked down at him; it seemed absurd, the belief of this crippled,
+      half-frozen creature, that four-shillings would make him happy. Happiness!
+      the fabled treasure of some far-away heaven I thought it that afternoon;
+      not to be bought with gold, not of this earth!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said something to this effect. But four shillings a day was enough for
+      the boot-black.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Why," he said, "I should be as 'appy as the Lord Mayor!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0086" id="link2H_4_0086"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>The Burden</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I know too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History and
+      Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over books;
+      believing in geological periods, cave-dwellers, Chinese Dynasties, and the
+      fixed stars has prematurely aged me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why am I to blame for all that is wrong in the world? I didn't invent Sin
+      and Hate and Slaughter. Who made it my duty anyhow to administer the
+      Universe, and keep the planets to their Copernican courses? My shoulders
+      are bent beneath the weight of the firmament; I grow weary of propping up,
+      like Atlas, this vast and erroneous Cosmos.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0087" id="link2H_4_0087"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      <i>Under An Umbrella</i>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      From under the roof of my umbrella I saw the washed pavement lapsing
+      beneath my feet, the news-posters lying smeared with dirt at the
+      crossings, the tracks of the busses in the liquid mud. On I went through
+      this dreary world of wetness. And through how many rains and years shall I
+      still hurry down wet streets&mdash;middle-aged, and then, perhaps, very
+      old? And on what errands?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asking myself this cheerless question I fade from your vision, Reader,
+      into the distance, sloping my umbrella against the wind.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THE END
+    </h3>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith
+
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+</html>
diff --git a/8544.txt b/8544.txt
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+++ b/8544.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Trivia
+
+Author: Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+
+Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8544]
+This file was first posted on July 21, 2003
+Last Updated: May 13, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRIVIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joris Van Dael, Charles Aldarondo, Charles
+Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TRIVIA
+
+
+By Logan Pearsall Smith
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+_Bibliographical Note_
+
+
+Some of these pieces were privately printed at the Chiswick
+Press in 1902. Others have appeared in the "New Statesman" and
+"The New Republic," and are here reprinted with the Editors'
+permission.
+
+
+
+
+_Preface_
+
+
+"You must beware of thinking too much about Style," said my
+kindly adviser, "or you will become like those fastidious people
+who polish and polish until there is nothing left."
+
+"Then there really are such people?" I asked, lost in the thought
+of how much I should like to meet them. But the well-informed
+lady could give me no precise information about them.
+
+I often hear of them in this tantalizing manner, and perhaps one
+day I shall get to know them. They sound delightful.
+
+
+
+
+_The Author_
+
+
+These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a
+large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the
+Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked
+Gorilla, the Baboon with his bright blue and scarlet bottom, and
+the long-eared Chimpanzee.
+
+
+
+
+_List of Contents_
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+    Preface
+
+    The Author
+
+    Happiness
+
+    To-day
+
+    The Afternoon Post
+
+    The Busy Bees
+
+    The Wheat
+
+    The Coming of Fate
+
+    My Speech
+
+    Stonehenge
+
+    The Stars
+
+    Silvia Doria
+
+    Bligh House
+
+    In Church
+
+    Parsons
+
+    The Sound of a Voice
+
+    What Happens
+
+    A Precaution
+
+    The Great Work
+
+    My Mission
+
+    The Birds
+
+    High Life
+
+    Empty Shells
+
+    Dissatisfaction
+
+    A Fancy
+
+    They
+
+    In the Pulpit
+
+    Human Ends
+
+    Lord Arden
+
+    The Starry Heaven
+
+    My Map
+
+    The Snob
+
+    Companions
+
+    Edification
+
+    The Rose
+
+    The Vicar of Lynch
+
+    Tu Quoque Fontium
+
+    The Spider
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+    L'Oiseau Bleu
+
+    At the Bank
+
+    Mammon
+
+    I See the World
+
+    Social Success Apotheosis
+
+    The Spring in London
+
+    Fashion Plates
+
+    Mental Vice
+
+    The Organ of Life
+
+    Humiliation
+
+    Green Ivory
+
+    In the Park
+
+    The Correct
+
+    "Where Do I Come In?"
+
+    Microbes
+
+    The Quest
+
+    The Kaleidoscope
+
+    Oxford Street
+
+    Beauty
+
+    The Power of Words
+
+    Self-Analysis
+
+    The Voice of the World
+
+    And Anyhow
+
+    Drawbacks
+
+    Talk
+
+    The Church of England
+
+    Misgiving
+
+    Sanctuaries
+
+    Symptoms
+
+    Shadowed
+
+    The Incredible
+
+    Terror
+
+    Pathos
+
+    Inconstancy
+
+    The Poplar
+
+    On the Doorstep Old Clothes
+
+    Youth
+
+    Consolation
+
+    Sir Eustace Carr
+
+    The Lord Mayor
+
+    The Burden
+
+    Under an Umbrella
+
+
+
+
+TRIVIA
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+_How blest my lot, in these sweet fields assign'd Where Peace
+and Leisure soothe the tuneful mind._
+
+SCOTT, of Amwell, _Moral Eclogues_ (1773)
+
+
+
+
+_Happiness_
+
+
+Cricketers on village greens, haymakers in the evening sunshine,
+small boats that sail before the wind--all these create in me
+the illusion of Happiness, as if a land of cloudless pleasure, a
+piece of the old Golden World, were hidden, not (as poets have
+imagined), in far seas or beyond inaccessible mountains, but
+here close at hand, if one could find it, in some undiscovered
+valley. Certain grassy lanes seem to lead between the meadows
+thither; the wild pigeons talk of it behind the woods.
+
+
+
+
+_To-Day_
+
+
+I woke this morning out of dreams into what we call Reality,
+into the daylight, the furniture of my familiar bedroom--in fact
+into the well-known, often-discussed, but, to my mind, as yet
+unexplained Universe.
+
+Then I, who came out of Eternity and seem to be on my way
+thither, got up and spent the day as I usually spend it. I read,
+I pottered, I talked, and took exercise; and I sat punctually
+down to eat the cooked meals that appeared at stated intervals.
+
+
+
+
+_The Afternoon Post_
+
+
+The village Post Office, with its clock and letter-box, its
+postmistress lost in tales of love-lorn Dukes and coroneted woe,
+and the sallow-faced grocer watching from his window opposite,
+is the scene of a daily crisis in my life, when every afternoon
+I walk there through the country lanes and ask that well-read
+young lady for my letters. I always expect good news and
+cheques; and then, of course, there is the magical Fortune which
+is coming, and word of it may reach me any day. What it is, this
+strange Felicity, or whence it shall come, I have no notion; but
+I hurry down in the morning to find the news on the breakfast
+table, open telegrams in delighted panic, and say to myself
+"Here it is!" when at night I hear wheels approaching along the
+road. So, happy in the hope of Happiness, and not greatly
+concerned with any other interest or ambition, I live on in my
+quiet, ordered house; and so I shall live perhaps until the end.
+Is it, indeed, merely the last great summons and revelation for
+which I am waiting? I do not know.
+
+
+
+
+_The Busy Bees_
+
+
+Sitting for hours idle in the shade of an apple tree, near
+the garden-hives, and under the aerial thoroughfares of those
+honey-merchants--sometimes when the noonday heat is loud with
+their minute industry, or when they fall in crowds out of the
+late sun to their night-long labours-I have sought instruction
+from the Bees, and tried to appropriate to myself the old
+industrious lesson.
+
+And yet, hang it all, who by rights should be the teachers and
+who the learners? For those peevish, over-toiled, utilitarian
+insects, was there no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of
+Me? Gazing out at me with myriad eyes from their joyless
+factories, might they not learn at last--might I not finally
+teach them--a wiser and more generous-hearted way to improve the
+shining hour?
+
+
+
+
+_The Wheat_
+
+
+The Vicar, whom I met once or twice in my walks about the
+fields, told me that he was glad that I was taking an interest
+in farming. Only my feeling about wheat, he said, puzzled him.
+
+Now the feeling in regard to wheat which I had not been able to
+make clear to the Vicar was simply one of amazement. Walking one
+day into a field that I had watched yellowing beyond the trees,
+I found myself dazzled by the glow and great expanse of gold. I
+bathed myself in the intense yellow under the intense blue sky;
+how dim it made the oak trees and copses and all the rest of the
+English landscape seem! I had not remembered the glory of the
+Wheat; nor imagined in my reading that in a country so far from
+the Sun there could be anything so rich, so prodigal, so
+reckless, as this opulence of ruddy gold, bursting out from the
+cracked earth as from some fiery vein below. I remembered how
+for thousands of years Wheat had been the staple of wealth, the
+hoarded wealth of famous cities and empires; I thought of the
+processes of corn-growing, the white oxen ploughing, the great
+barns, the winnowing fans, the mills with the splash of their
+wheels, or arms slow-turning in the wind; of cornfields at
+harvest-time, with shocks and sheaves in the glow of sunset, or
+under the sickle moon; what beauty it brought into the northern
+landscape, the antique, passionate, Biblical beauty of the
+South!
+
+
+
+
+_The Coming of Fate_
+
+
+When I seek out the sources of my thoughts, I find they had
+their beginning in fragile Chance; were born of little moments
+that shine for me curiously in the past. Slight the impulse that
+made me take this turning at the crossroads, trivial and
+fortuitous the meeting, and light as gossamer the thread
+that first knit me to my friend. These are full of wonder;
+more mysterious are the moments that must have brushed me
+with their wings and passed me by: when Fate beckoned and I
+did not see it, when new Life trembled for a second on the
+threshold; but the word was not spoken, the hand was not
+held out, and the Might-have-been shivered and vanished, dim
+as a into the waste realms of non-existence.
+
+So I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm
+of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents. Why,
+to-day, perhaps, or next week, I may hear a voice, and, packing
+up my Gladstone bag, follow it to the ends of the world.
+
+
+
+
+_My Speech_
+
+
+"Ladies and Gentlemen," I began--The Vicar was in the chair;
+Mrs. La Mountain and her daughters sat facing us; and in the
+little schoolroom, with its maps and large Scripture prints,
+its blackboard with the day's sums still visible on it, were
+assembled the labourers of the village, the old family coachman
+and his wife, the one-eyed postman, and the gardeners and
+boys from the Hall. Having culled from the newspapers a few
+phrases, I had composed a speech which I delivered with a
+spirit and eloquence surprising even to myself, and which was
+now enthusiastically received. The Vicar cried "Hear, Hear!",
+the Vicar's wife pounded her umbrella with such emphasis, and
+the villagers cheered so heartily, that my heart was warmed. I
+began to feel the meaning of my own words; I beamed on the
+audience, felt that they were all brothers, all wished well
+to the Republic; and it seemed to me an occasion to express
+my real ideas and hopes for the Commonwealth.
+
+Brushing therefore to one side, and indeed quite forgetting my
+safe principles, I began to refashion and new-model the State.
+Most existing institutions were soon abolished; and then, on
+their ruins, I proceeded to build up the bright walls and
+palaces of the City within me--the City I had read of in Plato.
+With enthusiasm, and, I flatter myself, with eloquence, I
+described it all--the Warriors, that race of golden youth bred
+from the State-ordered embraces of the brave and fair; those
+philosophic Guardians, who, being ever accustomed to the highest
+and most extensive views, and thence contracting an habitual
+greatness, possessed the truest fortitude, looking down indeed
+with a kind of disregard on human life and death. And then,
+declaring that the pattern of this City was laid up in Heaven, I
+sat down, amid the cheers of the uncomprehending little
+audience.
+
+And afterward, in my rides about the country, when I saw on
+walls and the doors of barns, among advertisements of sales, or
+regulations about birds' eggs or the movements of swine, little
+weather-beaten, old-looking notices on which it was stated that
+I would "address the meeting," I remembered how the walls and
+towers of the City I had built up in that little schoolroom had
+shone with no heavenly light in the eyes of the Vicar's party.
+
+
+
+
+_Stonehenge_
+
+
+They sit there forever on the dim horizon of my mind, that
+Stonehenge circle of elderly disapproving Faces--Faces of the
+Uncles and Schoolmasters and Tutors who frowned on my youth.
+
+In the bright centre and sunlight I leap, I caper, I dance my
+dance; but when I look up, I see they are not deceived. For
+nothing ever placates them, nothing ever moves to a look of
+approval that ring of bleak and contemptuous Faces.
+
+
+
+
+_The Stars_
+
+
+Battling my way homeward one dark night against the wind and
+rain, a sudden gust, stronger than the others, drove me back
+into the shelter of a tree. But soon the Western sky broke open;
+the illumination of the Stars poured down from behind the
+dispersing clouds.
+
+I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they filled the
+night with their soft lustre. So I went my way accompanied by
+them; Arcturus followed me, and becoming entangled in a leafy
+tree, shone by glimpses, and then emerged triumphant, Lord of
+the Western sky. Moving along the road in the silence of my own
+footsteps, my thoughts were among the Constellations. I was one
+of the Princes of the starry Universe; in me also there was
+something that was not insignificant and mean and of no account.
+
+
+
+
+_Silvia Doria_
+
+
+Beyond the blue hills, within riding distance, there is a
+country of parks and beeches, with views of the far-off sea. I
+remember in one of my rides coming on the place which was the
+scene of the pretty, old-fashioned story of Silvia Doria.
+Through the gates, with fine gate-posts, on which heraldic
+beasts, fierce and fastidious, were upholding coroneted shields,
+I could see, at the end of the avenue, the facade of the House,
+with its stone pilasters, and its balustrade on the steep roof.
+
+More than one hundred years ago, in that Park, with its
+Italianized house, and level gardens adorned with statues and
+garden temples, there lived, they say, an old Lord with his two
+handsome sons. The old Lord had never ceased mourning for his
+Lady, though she had died a good many years before; there were
+no neighbours he visited, and few strangers came inside the
+great Park walls. One day in Spring, however, just when the
+apple trees had burst into blossom, the gilded gates were thrown
+open, and a London chariot with prancing horses drove up the
+Avenue. And in the chariot, smiling and gay, and indeed very
+beautiful in her dress of yellow silk, and her great Spanish hat
+with drooping feathers, sat Silvia Doria, come on a visit to her
+cousin, the old Lord.
+
+It was her father who had sent her--that he might be more free,
+some said, to pursue his own wicked courses--while others
+declared that he intended her to marry the old Lord's eldest
+son.
+
+In any case, Silvia Doria came like the Spring, like the
+sunlight, into the lonely place. Even the old Lord felt himself
+curiously happy when he heard her voice singing about the house;
+as for Henry and Francis, it was heaven for them just to walk by
+her side down the garden alleys.
+
+And Silvia Doria, though hitherto she had been but cold toward
+the London gallants who had courted her, found, little by
+little, that her heart was not untouched.
+
+But, in spite of her father, and her own girlish love of gold
+and rank, it was not for Henry that she cared, not for the old
+Lord, but for Francis, the younger son. Did Francis know of
+this? They were secretly lovers, the old scandal reported; and
+the scandal, it may be, had reached her father's ears.
+
+For one day a coach with foaming horses, and the wicked face of
+an old man at its window, galloped up the avenue; and soon
+afterwards, when the coach drove away, Silvia Doria was sitting
+by the old man's side, sobbing bitterly.
+
+And after she had gone, a long time, many of the old, last-century
+years, went by without any change. And then Henry, the eldest son,
+was killed in hunting; and the old Lord dying a few years later,
+the titles and the great house and all the land and gold came to
+Francis, the younger son. But after his father's death he was but
+seldom there; having, as it seemed, no love for the place, and
+living for the most part abroad and alone, for he never married.
+
+And again, many years went by. The trees grew taller and darker
+about the house; the yew hedges unclipt now, hung their branches
+over the moss-grown paths; ivy almost smothered the statues; and
+the plaster fell away in great patches from the discoloured
+garden temples.
+
+But at last one day a chariot drove up to the gates; a footman
+pulled at the crazy bell, telling the gate-keeper that his
+mistress wished to visit the Park. So the gates creaked open,
+the chariot glittered up the avenue to the deserted place; and a
+lady stepped out, went into the garden, and walked among its
+moss-grown paths and statues. As the chariot drove out again,
+"Tell your Lord," the lady said, smiling, to the lodge-keeper,
+"that Silvia Doria came back."
+
+
+
+
+_Bligh House_
+
+
+To the West, in riding past the walls of Bligh, I remembered an
+incident in the well-known siege of that house, during the Civil
+Wars: How, among Waller's invading Roundhead troops, there
+happened to be a young scholar, a poet and lover of the Muses,
+fighting for the cause, as he thought, of ancient Freedom, who,
+one day, when the siege was being more hotly urged, pressing
+forward and climbing a wall, suddenly found himself in a quiet
+old garden by the house. And here, for a time forgetting, as it
+would seem, the battle, and heedless of the bullets that now and
+then flew past him like peevish wasps, the young Officer stayed,
+gathering roses--old-fashioned damask roses, streaked with red
+and white--which, for the sake of a Court Beauty, there besieged
+with her father, he carried to the house; falling, however,
+struck by a chance bullet, or shot perhaps by one of his own
+party. A few of the young Officer's verses, written in the
+stilted fashion of the time, and almost unreadable now, have
+been preserved. The lady's portrait hangs in the white drawing
+room at Bligh; a simpering, faded figure, with ringlets and
+drop-pearls, and a dress of amber-coloured silk.
+
+
+
+
+_In Church_
+
+
+"For the Pen," said the Vicar; and in the sententious pause that
+followed, I felt that I would offer any gifts of gold to avert
+or postpone the solemn, inevitable, hackneyed, and yet, as it
+seemed to me, perfectly appalling statement that "the Pen is
+mightier than the Sword."
+
+
+
+
+_Parsons_
+
+
+All the same I like Parsons; they think nobly of the Universe,
+and believe in Souls and Eternal Happiness. And some of them, I
+am told, believe in Angels--that there are Angels who guide our
+footsteps, and flit to and fro unseen on errands in the air
+about us.
+
+
+
+
+_The Sound of a Voice_
+
+
+As the thoughtful Baronet talked, as his voice went on sounding
+in my ears, all the light of desire, and of the sun, faded from
+the Earth; I saw the vast landscape of the world dim, as in an
+eclipse; its populations eating their bread with tears, its rich
+men sitting listless in their palaces, and aged Kings crying
+"Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity!" lugubriously from their
+thrones.
+
+
+
+
+_What Happens_
+
+
+"Yes," said Sir Thomas, speaking of a modern novel, "it
+certainly does seem strange; but the novelist was right. Such
+things do happen."
+
+"But my dear Sir," I burst out, in the rudest manner, "think
+what life is--just think what really happens! Why people
+suddenly swell up and turn dark purple; they hang themselves on
+meat-hooks; they are drowned in horse-ponds, are run over by
+butchers' carts, and are burnt alive and cooked like mutton
+chops!"
+
+
+
+
+_A Precaution_
+
+
+The folio gave at length philosophic consolations for all
+the ills and misfortunes said by the author to be inseparable
+from human existence--Poverty, Shipwreck, Plague, Love-Deceptions,
+and Inundations. Against these antique Disasters I armed my soul;
+and I thought it as well to prepare myself against another
+inevitable ancient calamity called "Cornutation," or by other
+less learned names. How Philosophy taught that after all it was
+but a pain founded on conceit, a blow that hurt not; the reply
+of the Cynic philosopher to one who reproached him, "Is it my
+fault or hers?"; how Nevisanus advises the sufferer to ask
+himself if he have not offended; Jerome declares it impossible
+to prevent; how few or none are safe, and the inhabitants of
+some countries, especially parts of Africa, consider it the
+usual and natural thing; How Caesar, Pompey, Augustus, Agamemnon,
+Menelaus, Marcus Aurelius, and many other great Kings and Princes
+had all worn Actaeon's badge; and how Philip turned it to a jest,
+Pertinax the Emperor made no reckoning of it; Erasmus declared it
+was best winked at, there being no remedy but patience, _Dies
+dolorem minuit_; Time, Age must mend it; and how according to
+the best authorities, bars, bolts, oaken doors, and towers of
+brass, are all in vain. "She is a woman," as the old Pedant
+wrote to a fellow Philosopher....
+
+
+
+
+_The Great Work_
+
+
+Sitting, pen in hand, alone in the stillness of the library,
+with flies droning behind the sunny blinds, I considered in my
+thoughts what should be the subject of my great Work. Should I
+complain against the mutability of Fortune, and impugn Fate and
+the Constellations; or should I reprehend the never-satisfied
+heart of querulous Man, drawing elegant contrasts between the
+unsullied snow of mountains, the serene shining of stars, and
+our hot, feverish lives and foolish repinings? Or should I
+confine myself to denouncing contemporary Vices, crying "Fie!"
+on the Age with Hamlet, sternly unmasking its hypocrisies, and
+riddling through and through its comfortable Optimisms?
+
+Or with Job, should I question the Universe, and puzzle my sad
+brains about Life--the meaning of Life on this apple-shaped
+Planet?
+
+
+
+
+_My Mission_
+
+
+But when in modern books, reviews, and thoughtful magazines I
+read about the Needs of the Age, its Complex Questions, its
+Dismays, Doubts, and Spiritual Agonies, I feel an impulse to go
+out and comfort it, to still its cries, and speak earnest words
+of Consolation to it.
+
+
+
+
+_The Birds_
+
+
+But how can one toil at the great task with this hurry and
+tumult of birds just outside the open window? I hear the Thrush,
+and the Blackbird, that romantic liar; then the delicate
+cadence, the wiry descending scale of the Willow-wren, or the
+Blackcap's stave of mellow music. All these are familiar--but
+what is that unknown voice, that thrilling note? I hurry out;
+the voice flees and I follow; and when I return and sit down
+again to my task, the Yellowhammer trills his sleepy song in the
+noonday heat; the drone of the Greenfinch lulls me into dreamy
+meditations. Then suddenly from his tree-trunks and forest
+recesses comes the Green Woodpecker, and mocks at me an impudent
+voice full of liberty and laughter.
+
+Why should all the birds of the air conspire against me? My
+concern is with the sad Human Species, with lapsed and erroneous
+Humanity, not with that inconsiderate, wandering, feather-headed
+race.
+
+
+
+
+_High Life_
+
+
+Although that immense Country House was empty and for sale, and
+I had got an order to view it, I needed all my courage to walk
+through the lordly gates, and up the avenue, and then to ring
+the door-bell. And when I was ushered in, and the shutters were
+removed to let the daylight into those vast apartments, I
+sneaked through them, cursing the dishonest curiosity which had
+brought me into a place where I had no business. But I was
+treated with such deference, and so plainly regarded as a
+possible purchaser, that I soon began to believe in the opulence
+imputed to me. From all the novels describing the mysterious and
+glittering life of the Great which I had read (and I had read
+many), there came to me the enchanting vision of my own
+existence in this Palace. I filled the vast spaces with the
+shine of jewels and stir of voices; I saw a vision of ladies
+sweeping in their tiaras down the splendid stairs.
+
+But my Soul, in her swell of pride, soon outgrew these paltry
+limits, O no! Never could I box up and house and localize under
+that lowly roof the Magnificence and Ostentation of which I was
+capable.
+
+Then for one thing there was stabling for only forty horses; and
+of course, as I told them, this would never do.
+
+
+
+
+_Empty Shells_
+
+
+They lie like empty seashells on the shores of Time, the old
+worlds which the spirit of man once built for his habitation,
+and then abandoned. Those little earth-centred, heaven-encrusted
+universes of the Greeks and Hebrews seem quaint enough to us,
+who have formed, thought by thought from within, the immense
+modern Cosmos in which we live--the great Creation of granite,
+planned in such immeasurable proportions, and moved by so
+pitiless a mechanism, that it sometimes appals even its own
+creators. The rush of the great rotating Sun daunts us; to think
+to the distance of the fixed stars cracks our brain.
+
+But if the ephemeral Being who has imagined these eternal
+spheres and spaces, must dwell almost as an alien in their icy
+vastness, yet what a splendour lights up for him and dazzles in
+those great halls! Anything less limitless would be now a
+prison; and he even dares to think beyond their boundaries, to
+surmise that he may one day outgrow this vast Mausoleum, and
+cast from him the material Creation as an integument too narrow
+for his insolent Mind.
+
+
+
+
+_Dissatisfaction_
+
+
+For one thing I hate Spiders--I dislike all kinds of Insects.
+Their cold intelligence, their empty, stereotyped, unremitted
+industry repel me. And I am not altogether happy about the
+future of the Human Race; when I think of the slow refrigeration
+of the Earth, the Sun's waning, and the ultimate, inevitable
+collapse of the Solar System, I have grave misgivings. And all
+the books I have read and forgotten-the thought that my mind is
+really nothing but a sieve--this, too, at times disheartens me.
+
+
+
+
+_A Fancy_
+
+More than once, though, I have pleased myself with the notion
+that somewhere there is good Company which will like this little
+Book--these Thoughts (if I may call them so) dipped up from that
+phantasmagoria or phosphorescence which, by some unexplained
+process of combustion, flickers over the large lump of soft gray
+matter in the bowl of my skull.
+
+
+
+
+_They_
+
+
+Their taste is exquisite; They live in Georgian houses, in
+a world of ivory and precious china, of old brickwork and
+stone pilasters. In white drawing rooms I see Them, or on
+blue, bird-haunted lawns. They talk pleasantly of me, and
+their eyes watch me. From the diminished, ridiculous picture
+of myself which the glass of the world gives me, I turn for
+comfort, for happiness, to my image in the kindly mirror of
+those eyes.
+
+Who are They? Where, in what paradise or palace, shall I ever
+find Them? I may walk all the streets, ring all the door-bells
+of the World, but I shall never find them. Yet nothing has
+value for me save In the crown of Their approval; for Their
+coming--which will never be--I build and plant, and for Them
+alone I secretly write this little Book, which They will never
+read.
+
+
+
+
+_In the Pulpit_
+
+
+The Vicar had certain literary tastes; in his youth he had
+written an _Ode to the Moon_; and he would speak of the
+difficulty he found in composing his sermons, week after week.
+
+Now I felt that if I composed and preached sermons, I should by
+no means confine myself to the Vicar's threadbare subjects--should
+preach the Wrath of God, and sound the Last Trump in
+the ears of my Hell-doomed congregation, cracking the heavens
+and dissolving the earth with the eclipses and thunders and
+earthquakes of the Day of Judgment. Then I might refresh them
+with high and incomprehensible Doctrines, beyond the reach
+of Reason--Predestination, Election, the Co-existences and
+Co-eternities of the incomprehensible Triad. And with what a
+holy vehemence would I exclaim and cry out against all forms
+of doctrinal Error--all the execrable hypotheses of the great
+Heresiarchs! Then there would be many ancient and learned and
+out-of-the-way Iniquities to denounce, and splendid, neglected
+Virtues to inculcate--Apostolic Poverty, and Virginity, that
+precious jewel, that fair garland, so prized in Heaven, but so
+rare on earth.
+
+For in the range of creeds and morals it is the highest peaks
+that shine for me with a certain splendour: it is toward those
+radiant Alps that, if I were a Clergyman, I would lead my flock
+to pasture.
+
+
+
+
+_Human Ends_
+
+
+I really was impressed, as we paced up and down the avenue, by
+the Vicar's words and weighty, weighed advice. He spoke of the
+various professions; mentioned contemporaries of his own who had
+achieved success: how one had a Seat in Parliament, would be
+given a Seat in the Cabinet when his party next came in; another
+was a Bishop with a Seat in the House of Lords; a third was a
+Barrister who was soon, it was said, to be raised to the Bench.
+
+But in spite of my good intentions, my real wish to find,
+before it is too late, some career or other for myself (and
+the question is getting serious), I am far too much at the
+mercy of ludicrous images. Front Seats, Episcopal, Judicial,
+Parliamentary Benches--were all the ends then, I asked my self,
+of serious, middle-aged ambition only things to sit on?
+
+
+
+
+_Lord Arden_
+
+
+"If I were Lord Arden," said the Vicar, "I should shut up that
+great House; it's too big--what can a young unmarried man...?"
+
+"If I were Lord Arden," said the Vicar's wife (and Mrs. La
+Mountain's tone showed how much she disapproved of that young
+Nobleman), "if I were Lord Arden, I should live there, and do my
+duty to my tenants and neighbours."
+
+"If I were Lord Arden," I said; but then it flashed vividly
+into my mind, suppose I really were this opulent young Lord?
+I quite forgot to whom I was talking; my memory was occupied
+with the names of people who had been famous for their enormous
+pleasures; who had filled their Palaces with guilty revels, and
+built Pyramids, Obelisks, and half-acre Tombs, to soothe their
+Pride. My mind kindled at the thought of these Audacities. "If
+I were Lord Arden!" I cried....
+
+
+
+
+_The Starry Heaven_
+
+
+"But what are they really? What do they say they are?" the small
+young lady asked me. We were looking up at the Stars, which were
+quivering that night in splendid hosts above the lawns and
+trees.
+
+So I tried to explain some of the views that have been held
+about them. How people first of all had thought them mere
+candles set in the sky, to guide their own footsteps when the
+Sun was gone; till wise men, sitting on the Chaldean plains, and
+watching them with aged eyes, became impressed with the solemn
+view that those still and shining lights were the executioners
+of God's decrees, and irresistible instruments of His Wrath; and
+that they moved fatally among their celestial Houses to ordain
+and set out the fortunes and misfortunes of each race of newborn
+mortals. And so it was believed that every man or woman had,
+from the cradle, fighting for or against him or her, some great
+Star, Formalhaut, perhaps, Aldebaran, Altair: while great Heroes
+and Princes were more splendidly attended, and marched out to
+their forgotten battles with troops and armies of heavenly
+Constellations.
+
+But this noble old view was not believed in now; the Stars were
+no longer regarded as malignant or beneficent Powers; and I
+explained how most serious people thought that somewhere--though
+just where they did not know--above the vault of Sky, was to be
+found the final home of earnest men and women; where, as a
+reward for their right views and conduct, they were to rejoice
+forever, wearing those diamonds of the starry night arranged in
+glorious crowns. This notion, however, had been disputed by
+Poets and Lovers: it was Love, according to these young
+astronomers, that moved the Sun and other Stars; the
+Constellations being heavenly palaces, where people who had
+adored each other were to meet and live always together after
+Death.
+
+Then I spoke of the modern and real immensity of the unfathomed
+Skies. But suddenly the vast meaning of my words rushed into my
+mind; I felt myself dwindling, falling through the blue. And
+yet, in these silent seconds, there thrilled through me in the
+cool sweet air and night no chill of death or nothingness; but
+the taste and joy of this Earth, this orchard-plot of earth,
+floating unknown, far away in unfathomed space, with its Moon
+and meadows.
+
+
+
+
+_My Map_
+
+
+The "Known World" I called the map which I amused myself making
+for the children's schoolroom. It included France, England,
+Italy, Greece, and all the old shores of the Mediterranean; but
+the rest I marked "Unknown"; sketching into the East the
+doubtful realms of Ninus and Semiramis; changing back Germany
+into the Hyrcanian Forest; and drawing pictures of the supposed
+inhabitants of these unexplored regions, Dog-Apes, Satyrs,
+Cannibals, and Misanthropes, Cimmerians involved in darkness,
+Amazons, and Headless Men. And all around the Map I coiled the
+coils, and curled the curling waves of the great Sea _Oceanum_,
+with the bursting cheeks of the four Winds, blowing from the
+four imagined hinges of the Universe.
+
+
+
+
+_The Snob_
+
+
+As I paced in fine company on that Terrace, I felt chosen,
+exempt, and curiously happy. There was a glamour in the air, a
+something in the special flavour of that moment that was like
+the consciousness of Salvation, or the smell of ripe peaches on
+a sunny wall.
+
+I know what you're going to call me, Reader. But I am not to be
+bullied and abashed by words. And after all, why not let oneself
+be dazzled and enchanted? Are not Illusions pleasant, and is
+this a world in which Romance hangs on every tree?
+
+And how about your own life? Is that, then, so full of golden
+visions?
+
+
+
+
+_Companions_
+
+
+Dearest, prettiest, and sweetest of my retinue, who gather
+with delicate industry bits of silk and down from the bleak
+world to make the soft nest of my fatuous repose; who ever
+whisper honied words in my ear, or trip before me holding up
+deceiving mirrors--is it Hope, or is it not rather Vanity,
+that I love the best?
+
+
+
+
+_Edification_
+
+
+"I must really improve my Mind," I tell myself, and once more
+begin to patch and repair that crazy structure. So I toil and
+toil on at the vain task of edification, though the wind tears
+off the tiles, the floors give way, the ceilings fall, strange
+birds build untidy nests in the rafters, and owls hoot and laugh
+in the tumbling chimneys.
+
+
+
+
+_The Rose_
+
+
+The old lady had always been proud of the great rose-tree in her
+garden, and was fond of telling how it had grown from a cutting
+she had brought years before from Italy, when she was first
+married. She and her husband had been travelling back in their
+carriage from Rome (it was before the time of railways), and on
+a bad piece of road south of Siena they had broken down, and had
+been forced to pass the night in a little house by the roadside.
+The accommodation was wretched of course; she had spent a
+sleepless night, and rising early had stood, wrapped up, at her
+window, with the cool air blowing on her face, to watch the
+dawn. She could still, after all these years, remember the blue
+mountains with the bright moon above them, and how a far-off
+town on one of the peaks had gradually grown whiter and whiter,
+till the moon faded, the mountains were touched with the pink
+of the rising sun, and suddenly the town was lit as by an
+illumination, one window after another catching and reflecting
+the sun's beams, till at last the whole little city twinkled and
+sparkled up in the sky like a nest of stars.
+
+That morning, finding they would have to wait while their
+carriage was being repaired, they had driven in a local
+conveyance up to the city on the mountain, where they had been
+told they would find better quarters; and there they had stayed
+two or three days. It was one of the miniature Italian cities
+with a high church, a pretentious piazza, a few narrow streets
+and little palaces, perched all compact and complete, on the top
+of a mountain, within an enclosure of walls hardly larger than
+an English kitchen garden. But it was full of life and noise,
+echoing all day and all night with the sounds of feet and
+voices.
+
+The Cafe of the simple inn where they stayed was the meeting-place
+of the notabilities of the little city; the _Sindaco_, the
+_avvocato_, the doctor, and a few others; and among them they
+noticed a beautiful, slim, talkative old man, with bright black
+eyes and snow-white hair--tail and straight and still with
+the figure of a youth, although the waiter told them with
+pride that the _Conte_ was _molto vecchio_--would in fact be
+eighty in the following year. He was the last of his family, the
+waiter added--they had once been great and rich people--but he
+had no descendants; in fact the waiter mentioned with complacency,
+as if it were a story on which the locality prided itself, that
+the _Conte_ had been unfortunate in love, and had never married.
+
+The old gentleman, however, seemed cheerful enough; and it was
+plain that he took an interest in the strangers, and wished to
+make their acquaintance. This was soon effected by the friendly
+waiter; and after a little talk the old man invited them to
+visit his villa and garden which were just outside the walls of
+the town. So the next afternoon, when the sun began to descend,
+and they saw in glimpses through doorways and windows blue
+shadows beginning to spread over the brown mountains, they went
+to pay their visit. It was not much of a place, a small,
+modernized stucco villa, with a hot pebbly garden, and in it a
+stone basin with torpid gold fish, and a statue of Diana and her
+hounds against the wall. But what gave a glory to it was a
+gigantic rose-tree which clambered over the house, almost
+smothering the windows, and filling the air with the perfume
+of its sweetness. Yes, it was a fine rose, the _Conte_ said
+proudly when they praised it, and he would tell the Signora
+about it. And as they sat there, drinking the wine he offered
+them, he alluded with the cheerful indifference of old age to
+his love-affair, as though he took for granted that they had
+heard of it already.
+
+"The lady lived across the valley there beyond that hill. I was
+a young man then, for it was many years ago. I used to ride over
+to see her; it was a long way, but I rode fast, for young men,
+as no doubt the Signora knows, are impatient. But the lady was
+not kind, she would keep me waiting, oh, for hours; and one day
+when I had waited very long I grew very angry, and as I walked
+up and down in the garden where she had told me she would see
+me, I broke one of her roses, broke a branch from it; and when I
+saw what I had done, I hid it inside my coat--so--and when I
+came home I planted it, and the Signora sees how it has grown.
+If the Signora admires it, I must give her a cutting to plant
+also in her garden; I am told the English have beautiful gardens
+that are green, and not burnt with the sun like ours."
+
+The next day, when their mended carriage had come up to fetch
+them, and they were just starting to drive away from the inn,
+the _Conte's_ old servant appeared with the rose-cutting neatly
+wrapped up, and the compliments and wishes for a _buon viaggio_
+from her master. The town collected to see them depart, and the
+children ran after their carriage through the gate of the little
+city. They heard a rush of feet behind them for a few moments,
+but soon they were far down toward the valley; the little town
+with all its noise and life was high above them on its mountain
+peak.
+
+She had planted the rose at home, where it had grown and
+flourished in a wonderful manner, and every June the great mass
+of leaves and shoots still broke out into a passionate splendour
+of scent and scarlet colour, as if in its root and fibres there
+still burnt the anger and thwarted desire of that Italian lover.
+Of course the old _Conte_ must have died many years ago; she had
+forgotten his name, and had even forgotten the name of the
+mountain city that she had stayed in, after first seeing it
+twinkling at dawn in the sky, like a nest of stars.
+
+
+
+
+_The Vicar of Lynch_
+
+
+When I heard through country gossip of the strange happening at
+Lynch which had caused so great a scandal, and led to the
+disappearance of the deaf old Vicar of that remote village, I
+collected all the reports I could about it, for I felt that at
+the centre of this uncomprehending talk and wild anecdote there
+was something with more meaning than a mere sudden outbreak of
+blasphemy and madness.
+
+It appeared that the old Vicar, after some years spent in the
+quiet discharge of his parochial duties, had been noticed to
+become more and more odd in his appearance and behaviour; and
+it was also said that he had gradually introduced certain
+alterations into the Church services. These had been vaguely
+supposed at the time to be of a High Church character, but
+afterwards they were put down to a growing mental derangement,
+which had finally culminated at that notorious Harvest Festival,
+when his career as a clergyman of the Church of England had
+ended. On this painful occasion the old man had come into church
+outlandishly dressed, and had gone through a service with
+chanted gibberish and unaccustomed gestures, and prayers which
+were unfamiliar to his congregation. There was also talk of a
+woman's figure on the altar, which the Vicar had unveiled at a
+solemn moment in this performance; and I also heard echo of
+other gossip--gossip that was, however, authoritatively
+contradicted and suppressed as much as possible--about the use
+of certain other symbols of a most unsuitable kind. Then a few
+days after the old man had disappeared--some of the neighbours
+believed that he was dead; some, that he was now shut up in an
+asylum for the insane.
+
+Such was the fantastic and almost incredible talk I listened to,
+but in which, as I say, I found much more meaning than my
+neighbours. For one thing, although they knew that the Vicar had
+come from Oxford to this remote College living, they knew
+nothing of his work and scholarly reputation in that University,
+and none of them had probably ever heard of--much less read--an
+important book which he had written, and which was the standard
+work on his special subject. To them he was simply a deaf,
+eccentric, and solitary clergyman; and I think I was the only
+person in the neighbourhood who had conversed with him on the
+subject concerning which he was the greatest living authority in
+England.
+
+For I had seen the old man once--curiously enough at the time of
+a Harvest Festival, though it was some years before the one
+which had led to his disappearance. Bicycling one day over the
+hills, I had ridden down into a valley of cornfields, and then,
+passing along an unfenced road that ran across a wide expanse of
+stubble, I came, after getting off to open three or four gates,
+upon a group of thatched cottages, with a little, unrestored
+Norman church standing among great elms, I left my bicycle and
+walked through the churchyard, and as I went into the church,
+through its deeply-recessed Norman doorway, a surprisingly
+pretty sight met my eyes. The dim, cool, little interior was
+set out and richly adorned with an abundance of fruit and
+vegetables, yellow gourds, apples and plums and golden wheat
+sheaves, great loaves of bread, and garlands of September
+flowers. A shabby-looking old clergyman was standing on the top
+of a step-ladder, finishing the decorations, when I entered. As
+soon as he saw me he came down, and I spoke to him, praising the
+decorations, and raising my voice a little, for I noticed that
+he was somewhat deaf. We talked of the Harvest Festival, and as
+I soon perceived that I was talking with a man of books and
+University education, I ventured to hint at what had vividly
+impressed me in that old, gaudily-decorated church--its pagan
+character, as if it were a rude archaic temple in some corner of
+the antique world, which had been adorned, two thousand years
+ago, by pious country folk for some local festival. The old
+clergyman was not in the least shocked by my remark; it seemed
+indeed rather to please him; there was, he agreed, something of
+a pagan character in the modern Harvest Festival--it was no
+doubt a bit of the old primitive Vegetation Ritual, the old
+Religion of the soil; a Festival, which, like so many others,
+had not been destroyed by Christianity, but absorbed into it,
+and given a new meaning. "Indeed," he added, talking on as if
+the subject interested him, and expressing himself with a
+certain donnish carefulness of speech that I found pleasant to
+listen to, "the Harvest Festival is undoubtedly a survival of
+the prehistoric worship of that Corn Goddess who, in classical
+times, was called Demeter and Ioulo and Ceres, but whose cult as
+an Earth-Mother and Corn-Spirit is of much greater antiquity.
+For there is no doubt that this Vegetation Spirit has been
+worshipped from the earliest times by agricultural peoples; the
+wheat fields and ripe harvests being naturally suggestive of the
+presence amid the corn of a kindly Being, who, in return for due
+rites and offerings, will vouchsafe nourishing rains and golden
+harvests." He mentioned the references in Virgil, and the
+description in Theocritus of a Sicilian Harvest Festival--these
+were no doubt familiar to me; but if I was interested in the
+subject, I should find, he said, much more information collected
+in a book which he had written, but of which I had probably
+never heard, about the Vegetation Deities in Greek Religion. As
+it happened I knew the book, and felt now much interested in my
+chance meeting with the distinguished author; and after
+expressing this as best I could, I rode off, promising to visit
+him again. This promise I was never able to fulfil; but when
+afterwards, on my return to the neighbourhood, I heard of that
+unhappy scandal, my memory of this meeting and our talk enabled
+me to form a theory as to what had really happened.
+
+It seemed plain to me that the change had been too violent for
+this elderly scholar, taken from his books and college rooms and
+set down in the solitude of this remote valley, amid the
+richness and living sap of Nature. The gay spectacle, right
+under his old eyes, of growing shoots and budding foliage, of
+blossoming and flowering, and the ripening of fruits and crops,
+had little by little (such was my theory) unhinged his brains.
+More and more his thoughts had come to dwell, not on the
+doctrines of the Church in which he had long ago taken orders,
+but on the pagan rites which had formed his life-long study,
+and which had been the expression of a life not unlike the
+agricultural life amid which he now found himself living. So as
+his derangement grew upon him in his solitude, he had gradually
+transformed, with a maniac's cunning, the Christian services,
+and led his little congregation, all unknown to themselves, back
+toward their ancestral worship of the Corn-Goddess. At last he
+had thrown away all disguise, and had appeared as a hierophant
+of Demeter, dressed in a fawn skin, with a crown of poplar
+leaves, and pedantically carrying the mystic basket and the
+winnowing fan appropriate to these mysteries. The wheaten posset
+he offered the shocked communicants belonged to these also, and
+the figure of a woman on the altar was of course the holy
+Wheatsheaf, whose unveiling was the culminating point in that
+famous ritual.
+
+It is much to be regretted that I could not recover full and
+more exact details of that celebration in which this great
+scholar had probably embodied his mature knowledge concerning a
+subject which has puzzled generations of students. But what
+powers of careful observation could one expect from a group of
+labourers and small farmers? Some of the things that reached my
+ears I refused to believe--the mention of pig's blood for
+instance, and especially the talk of certain grosser symbols,
+which the choir boys, it was whispered, had carried about the
+church in ceremonious procession. Village people have strange
+imaginations; and to this event, growing more and more monstrous
+as they talked it over, they must themselves have added this
+grotesque detail. However, I have written to consult an Oxford
+authority on this interesting point, and he has been kind enough
+to explain at length that although at the _Haloa_, or winter
+festival of the Corn-Goddess, and also at the _Chloeia_, or
+festival in early spring, some symbolization of the reproductive
+powers of Nature would be proper and appropriate, it would have
+been quite out of place at the _Thalysia_, or autumn festival of
+thanksgiving. I feel certain that a solecism of this nature--the
+introduction into a particular rite of features not sanctioned
+by the texts--would have seemed a shocking thing, even to the
+unhinged mind of one who had always been so careful a scholar.
+
+
+
+
+_Tu Quoque Fontium_
+
+
+Just to sit in the Sun, to bask like an animal in its heat--this
+is one of my country recreations. And often I reflect what a
+thing after all it is still to be alive and sitting here, above
+all the buried people of the world, in the kind and famous
+Sunshine.
+
+Beyond the orchard there is a place where the stream, hurrying out
+from under a bridge, makes for itself a quiet pool. A beech-tree
+upholds its green light over the blue water; and there, when I
+have grown weary of the sun, the great glaring indiscriminating
+Sun, I can shade myself and read my book. And listening to this
+water's pretty voices I invent for it exquisite epithets, calling
+it _silver-clean_ or _moss-margined_ or _nymph-frequented_, and
+idly promise to place it among the learned fountains and pools
+of the world, making of it a cool green thought for English exiles
+in the dust and glare of Eastern deserts.
+
+
+
+
+_The Spider_
+
+
+What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind?
+To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to
+a barrel full of floating froth and refuse?
+
+No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung
+on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with
+dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the
+Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny
+Soul.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+_"Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: Through spacious streets
+conduct thy bard along."_
+
+Gay's _Trivia, or New Art of Walking Streets of London._
+
+
+
+
+_L'oiseau Bleu_
+
+
+What is it, I have more than once asked myself, what is it that
+I am looking for in my walks about London? Sometimes it seems to
+me as if I were following a Bird, a bright Bird that sings
+sweetly as it floats about from one place to another.
+
+When I find myself however among persons of middle age and settled
+principles, see them moving regularly to their offices--what keeps
+them going? I ask myself. And I feel ashamed of myself and my Bird.
+
+There is though a Philosophic Doctrine--I studied it at College,
+and I know that many serious people believe it--which maintains
+that all men, in spite of appearances and pretensions, all live
+alike for Pleasure. This theory certainly brings portly,
+respected persons very near to me. Indeed with a sense of low
+complicity I have sometimes followed and watched a Bishop. Was
+he too on the hunt for Pleasure, solemnly pursuing his Bird?
+
+
+
+
+_At The Bank_
+
+
+Entering the Bank in a composed manner, I drew a cheque and
+handed it to the cashier through the grating. Then I eyed him
+narrowly. Would not that astute official see that I was only
+posing as a Real Person? No; he calmly opened a little drawer,
+took out some real sovereigns, counted them carefully, and
+handed them to me in a brass-tipped shovel. I went away feeling
+I had perpetrated a delightful fraud. I had got some of the gold
+of the actual world!
+
+Yet now and then, at the sight of my name on a visiting card, or
+of my face photographed in a group among other faces, or when I
+see a letter addressed in my hand, or catch the sound of my own
+voice, I grow shy in the presence of a mysterious Person who is
+myself, is known by my name, and who apparently does exist. Can
+it be possible that I am as real as any one else, and that all
+of us--the cashier and banker at the Bank, the King on his
+throne--all feel ourselves like ghosts and goblins in this
+authentic world?
+
+
+
+
+_Mammon_
+
+
+Moralists and Church Fathers have named it the root of all Evil,
+the begetter of hate and bloodshed, the sure cause of the soul's
+damnation. It has been called "trash," "muck," "dunghill
+excrement," by grave authors. The love of it is denounced in all
+Sacred Writings; we find it reprehended on Chaldean bricks, and
+in the earliest papyri. Buddha, Confucius, Christ, set their
+faces against it; and they have been followed in more modern
+times by beneficed Clergymen, Sunday School Teachers, and the
+leaders of the Higher Thought. But have the condemnations of all
+the ages done anything to tarnish that bright lustre? Men dig
+for it ever deeper into the earth's intestines, travel in search
+of it farther and farther to arctic and unpleasant regions.
+
+In spite of all my moral reading, I must confess that I like to
+have some of this gaudy substance in my pocket. Its presence
+cheers and comforts me, diffuses a genial warmth through my
+body. My eyes rejoice in the shine of it; its clinquant sound is
+music in my ears. Since I then am in his paid service, and
+reject none of the doles of his bounty, I too dwell in the House
+of Mammon. I bow before the Idol, and taste the unhallowed
+ecstasy.
+
+How many Altars have been overthrown, and how many Theologies
+and heavenly Dreams have had their bottoms knocked out of them,
+while He has sat there, a great God, golden and adorned, and
+secure on His unmoved throne?
+
+
+
+
+_I See the World_
+
+
+"But you go nowhere, see nothing of the world," my cousins said.
+Now though I do go sometimes to the parties to which I am now
+and then invited, I find, as a matter of fact, that I get really
+much more pleasure by looking in at windows, and have a way of
+my own of seeing the World. And of summer evenings, when motors
+hurry through the late twilight, and the great houses take on
+airs of inscrutable expectation, I go owling out through the
+dusk; and wandering toward the West, lose my way in unknown
+streets--an unknown City of revels. And when a door opens and a
+bediamonded Lady moves to her motor over carpets unrolled by
+powdered footmen, I can easily think her some great Courtezan,
+or some half-believed Duchess, hurrying to card-tables and lit
+candles and strange scenes of joy. I like to see that there are
+still splendid people on this flat earth; and at dances,
+standing in the street with the crowd, and stirred by the music,
+the lights, the rushing sound of voices, I think the Ladies as
+beautiful as Stars who move up those lanes of light past our
+rows of vagabond faces; the young men look like Lords in novels;
+and if (it has once or twice happened) people I know go by me,
+they strike me as changed and rapt beyond my sphere. And when on
+hot nights windows are left open, and I can look in at Dinner
+Parties, as I peer through lace curtains and window-flowers at
+the silver, the women's shoulders, the shimmer of their jewels,
+and the divine attitudes of their heads as they lean and listen,
+I imagine extraordinary intrigues and unheard of wines and
+passions.
+
+
+
+
+_Social Success_
+
+
+The servant gave me my coat and hat, and in a glow of
+self-satisfaction I walked out into the night. "A delightful evening," I
+reflected, "the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and
+French philosophy impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a
+pig squealing."
+
+But soon after, "God, it's awful," I muttered, "I wish I were dead."
+
+
+
+
+_Apotheosis_
+
+
+But Oh, those heavenly moments when I feel this trivial universe
+too small to contain my Attributes; when a sense of the divine
+Ipseity invades me; when I know that my voice is the voice of
+Truth, and my umbrella God's umbrella!
+
+
+
+
+_The Spring in London_
+
+
+London seemed last winter like an underground city; as if its
+low sky were the roof of a cave, and its murky day a light such
+as one reads of in countries beneath the earth.
+
+And yet the natural sunlight sometimes shone there; white clouds
+voyaged in the blue sky; the interminable multitudes of roofs
+were washed with silver by the Moon, or cloaked with a mantle of
+new-fallen snow. And the coming of Spring to London was to me
+not unlike the descent of the maiden-goddess into Death's
+Kingdoms, when pink almond blossoms blew about her in the gloom,
+and those shadowy people were stirred with faint longings for
+meadows and the shepherd's life. Nor was there anything more
+virginal and fresh in wood or orchard than the shimmer of young
+foliage, which, in May, dimmed with delicate green all the
+smoke-blackened London trees.
+
+
+
+
+_Fashion Plates_
+
+
+I like loitering at the bookstalls, looking in at the windows of
+printshops, and romancing over the pictures I see of shepherdesses
+and old-fashioned Beauties. Tall and slim and crowned with plumes
+in one period, in another these Ladies become as wide-winged as
+butterflies, or float, large, balloon-like visions, down summer
+streets. And yet in all shapes they have always (I tell myself)
+created thrilling effects of beauty, and waked in the breasts of
+modish young men ever the same charming Emotion.
+
+But then I have questioned this. Is the emotion always precisely
+the same? Is it true to say that the human heart remains quite
+unchanged beneath all the changing fashions of frills and
+ruffles? In this elegant and cruel Sentiment, I rather fancy
+that colour and shape do make a difference. I have a notion that
+about 1840 was the Zenith, the Meridian Hour, the Golden Age of
+the Passion. Those tight-waisted, whiskered Beaux, those
+crinolined Beauties, adored one another, I believe, with a
+leisure, a refinement, and dismay not quite attainable at other
+dates.
+
+
+
+
+_Mental Vice_
+
+
+There are certain hackneyed Thoughts that will force them-selves
+on me; I find my mind, especially in hot weather, infested and
+buzzed about by moral Platitudes. "That shows--" I say to
+myself, or, "How true it is--" or, "I really ought to have
+known!" The sight of a large clock sets me off into musings on
+the flight of Time; a steamer on the Thames or lines of
+telegraph inevitably suggest the benefits of Civilization, man's
+triumph over Nature, the heroism of Inventors, the courage, amid
+ridicule and poverty, of Stephenson and Watt. Like faint, rather
+unpleasant smells, these thoughts lurk about railway stations. I
+can hardly post a letter without marvelling at the excellence
+and accuracy of the Postal System.
+
+Then the pride in the British Constitution and British Freedom,
+which comes over me when I see, even in the distance, the Towers
+of Westminster Palace--that Mother of Parliaments--it is not
+much comfort that this should be chastened, as I walk down the
+Embankment, by the sight of Cleopatra's Needle, and the Thought
+that it will no doubt witness the Fall of the British, as it has
+that of other Empires, remaining to point its Moral, as old as
+Egypt, to Antipodeans musing on the dilapidated bridges.
+
+I am sometimes afraid of finding that there is a moral for
+everything; that the whole great frame of the Universe has a key,
+like a box; has been contrived and set going by a well-meaning
+but humdrum Eighteenth-century Creator. It would be a kind of
+Hell, surely, a world in which everything could be at once
+explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated with
+Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, industrious bees,
+and preaching animals. The benefits of Civilization cloy me. I
+have seen enough shining of the didactic Sun.
+
+So gazing up on hot summer nights at the London stars, I cool my
+thoughts with a vision of the giddy, infinite, meaningless waste
+of Creation, the blazing Suns, the Planets and frozen Moons, all
+crashing blindly forever across the void of space.
+
+
+
+
+_The Organ of Life_
+
+
+Almost always In London--in the congregated uproar of streets,
+or in the noise that drifts through wails and windows--you can
+hear the hackneyed melancholy of street music; a music which
+sounds like the actual voice of the human Heart, singing the
+lost joys, the regrets, the loveless lives of the people who
+blacken the pavements, or jolt along on the busses.
+
+"Speak to me kindly," the hand-organ implores; "I'm all alone!"
+it screams amid the throng; "thy Vows are all broken," it
+laments in dingy courtyards, "And light is thy Fame." And of hot
+summer afternoons, the Cry for Courage to Remember, or Calmness
+to Forget, floats in with the smell of paint and asphalt--faint
+and sad--through open office windows.
+
+
+
+
+_Humiliation_
+
+
+"My own view is," I began, but no one listened. At the next
+pause, "I always say," I remarked, but again the loud talk went
+on. Someone told a story. When the laughter had ended, "I often
+think--"; but looking round the table I could catch no friendly
+or attentive eye. It was humiliating, but more humiliating the
+thought that Sophocles and Goethe would have always commanded
+attention, while the lack of it would not have troubled Spinoza
+or Abraham Lincoln.
+
+
+
+
+_Green Ivory_
+
+
+What a bore it is, waking up in the morning always the same
+person. I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big,
+bushy eyebrows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep
+Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist.
+
+I should like to be refined and melancholy, the victim of a
+hopeless passion; to love in the old, stilted way, with
+impossible Adoration and Despair under the pale-faced Moon.
+
+I wish I could get up; I wish I were the world's greatest
+Violinist. I wish I had lots of silver, and first Editions, and
+green ivory.
+
+
+
+
+_In The Park_
+
+
+"Yes," I said one afternoon in the Park, as I looked rather
+contemptuously at the people of Fashion, moving slow and
+well-dressed in the sunshine, "but how about the others, the
+Courtiers and Beauties and Dandies of the past? They wore
+fine costumes, and glittered for their hour in the summer
+air. What has become of them?" I somewhat rhetorically asked.
+They were all dead now. Their day was over. They were cold
+in their graves.
+
+And I thought of those severe spirits who, in garrets far from
+the Park and Fashion, had scorned the fumes and tinsel of the
+noisy World.
+
+But, good Heavens! these severe spirits were, it occurred to me,
+all, as a matter of fact, quite as dead as the others.
+
+
+
+
+_The Correct_
+
+
+I am sometimes visited by a suspicion that everything isn't
+quite all right with the Righteous; that the Moral Law speaks in
+muffled and dubious tones to those who listen most scrupulously
+for its dictates. I feel sure I have detected a look of doubt
+and misgiving in the eyes of its earnest upholders.
+
+But there is no such shadow or cloud on the faces in Club
+windows, or in the eyes of drivers of four-in-hands, or of
+fashionable young men walking down Piccadilly. For these live
+by a Rule which has not been drawn down from far-off and
+questionable skies, and needs no sanction; what they do is
+Correct, and that is all. Correctly dressed from head to foot,
+they pass, with correct speech and thoughts and gestures,
+correctly across the roundness of the Earth.
+
+
+
+
+_"Where Do I Come In?"_
+
+
+When I read in the _Times_ about India and all its problems and
+populations; when I look at the letters in large type of
+important personages, and find myself face to face with the
+Questions, Movements, and great Activities of the Age, "Where do
+I come in?" I ask myself uneasily.
+
+Then in the great _Times_-reflected world I find the corner
+where I play my humble but necessary part. For I am one of the
+unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be
+a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die,
+in constant ratios; who regularly lose so many umbrellas, post
+just so many unaddressed letters every year. And there are
+enthusiasts among us who, without the least thought of their own
+convenience, allow omnibuses to run over them; or throw
+themselves month by month, in fixed numbers, from the London
+bridges.
+
+
+
+
+_Microbes_
+
+
+But how Is one to keep free from those mental microbes that
+worm-eat people's brains--those Theories and Diets and Enthusiasms
+and infectious Doctrines that we are always liable to catch from
+what seem the most innocuous contacts? People go about laden with
+germs; they breathe creeds and convictions on you whenever they
+open their mouths. Books and newspapers are simply creeping with
+them--the monthly Reviews seem to have room for nothing else.
+Wherewithal then shall a young man cleanse his way; and how shall
+he keep his mind immune to Theosophical speculations, and novel
+schemes of Salvation?
+
+Can he ever be sure that he won't be suddenly struck down by the
+fever of Funeral, or of Spelling Reform, or take to his bed with
+a new Sex Theory?
+
+But is this struggle for a healthy mind in a maggoty universe
+really after all worth it? Are there not soporific dreams and
+sweet deliriums more soothing than Reason? If Transmigration can
+make clear the dark Problem of Evil; if Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy can
+free us from the dominion of Death; if the belief that Bacon
+wrote Shakespeare gives a peace that the world cannot give, why
+pedantically reject such kindly solace? Why not be led with the
+others by still waters, and be made to lie down in green
+pastures?
+
+
+
+
+_The Quest_
+
+
+"We walk alone in the world," the Moralist, at the end of his
+essay on Ideal Friendship, writes somewhat sadly, "Friends such
+as we desire are dreams and fables," Yet we never quite give up
+the hope of finding them. But what awful things happen to us?
+what snubs, what set-downs we experience, what shames and
+disillusions. We can never really tell what these new unknown
+persons may do to us. Sometimes they seem nice, and then begin
+to talk like gramophones. Sometimes they grab at us with moist
+hands, or breathe hotly on our necks, or make awful confidences,
+or drench us from sentimental slop-pails. And too often, among
+the thoughts in the loveliest heads, we come on nests of woolly
+caterpillars.
+
+And yet we brush our hats, pull on our gloves, and go out and
+ring door-bells.
+
+
+
+
+_The Kaleidoscope_
+
+
+I find in my mind, in its miscellany of ideas and musings, a
+curious collection of little landscapes and pictures, shining
+and fading for no reason. Sometimes they are views in no way
+remarkable-the corner of a road, a heap of stones, an old gate.
+But there are many charming pictures, too: as I read, between my
+eyes and book, the Moon sheds down on harvest fields her chill
+of silver; I see autumnal avenues, with the leaves falling, or
+swept in heaps; and storms blow among my thoughts, with the rain
+beating forever on the fields. Then Winter's upward glare of
+snow appears; or the pink and delicate green of Spring in the
+windy sunshine; or cornfields and green waters, and youths
+bathing in Summer's golden heats.
+
+And as I walk about, certain places haunt me: a cathedral rises
+above a dark blue foreign town, the colour of ivory in the
+sunset light; now I find myself in a French garden full of
+lilacs and bees, and shut-in sunshine, with the Mediterranean
+lounging and washing outside its walls; now in a little college
+library, with busts, and the green reflected light of Oxford
+lawns--and again I hear the bells, reminding me of the familiar
+Oxford hours.
+
+
+
+
+_Oxford Street_
+
+
+One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of
+vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I
+was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted
+shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had
+faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods
+displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share
+in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious
+faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London
+traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant
+and sad--into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which
+sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence,
+blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore,
+the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace
+beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. _Om Mani
+padme hum_--I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the
+pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.
+
+Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked
+that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was
+enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the
+Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that
+turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.
+
+
+
+
+_Beauty_
+
+
+Among all the ugly mugs of the world we see now and then a face
+made after the divine pattern. Then, a wonderful thing happens
+to us; the Blue Bird sings, the golden Splendour shines, and for
+a queer moment everything seems meaningless save our impulse to
+follow those fair forms, to follow them to the clear Paradises
+they promise.
+
+Plato assures us that these moments are not (as we are apt to
+think them) mere blurs and delusions of the senses, but divine
+revelations; that in a lovely face we see imaged, as in a
+mirror, the Absolute Beauty--; it is Reality, flashing on us in
+the cave where we dwell amid shadows and darkness. Therefore we
+should follow these fair forms, and their shining footsteps will
+lead us upward to the highest heaven of Wisdom. The Poets, too,
+keep chanting this great doctrine of Beauty in grave notes to
+their golden strings. Its music floats up through the skies so
+sweet, so strange, that the very Angels seem to lean from their
+stars to listen.
+
+But, O Plato, O Shelley, O Angels of Heaven, what scrapes you do
+get us into!
+
+
+
+
+_The Power of Words_
+
+
+I thanked the club porter who helped me into my coat, and
+stepped out lightly into the vastness and freshness of the
+Night. And as I walked along my eyes were dazzling with the
+glare I had left; I still seemed to hear the sound of my speech,
+and the applause and laughter.
+
+And when I looked up at the Stars, the great Stars that bore
+me company, streaming over the dark houses as I moved, I felt
+that I was the Lord of Life; the mystery and disquieting
+meaninglessness of existence--the existence of other people,
+and of my own, were solved for me now. As for the Earth,
+hurrying beneath my feet, how bright was its journey; how
+shining the goal toward which it went swinging--you might
+really say leaping--through the sky.
+
+"I must tell the Human Race of this!" I heard my voice; saw my
+prophetic gestures, as I expounded the ultimate meaning of
+existence to the white, rapt faces of Humanity. Only to find the
+words--that troubled me; were there then no words to describe
+this Vision--divine--intoxicating?
+
+And then the Word struck me; the Word people would use. I
+stopped in the street; my Soul was silenced like a bell that
+snarls at a jarring touch. I stood there awhile and meditated on
+language, its perfidious meanness, the inadequacy, the ignominy
+of our vocabulary, and how Moralists have spoiled our words by
+distilling into them, as into little vials of poison, all their
+hatred of human joy. Away with that police-force of brutal words
+which bursts in on our best moments and arrests our finest
+feelings! This music within me, large, like the song of the
+stars--like a Glory of Angels singing--"No one has any right to
+say I am drunk!" I shouted.
+
+
+
+
+_Self-Analysis_
+
+
+"Yes, aren't they odd, the thoughts that float through one's
+mind for no reason? But why not be frank--I suppose the best of
+us are shocked at times by the things we find ourselves
+thinking. Don't you agree," I went on, not noticing (until it
+was too late) that all other conversation had ceased, and the
+whole dinner-party was listening, "don't you agree that the
+oddest of all are the improper thoughts that come into one's
+head--the unspeakable words I mean, and Obscenities?" When I
+remember that remark, I hasten to enlarge my mind with ampler
+considerations. I think of Space, and the unimportance in its
+unmeasured vastness, of our toy solar system; I lose myself in
+speculations on the lapse of Time, reflecting how at the best
+our human life on this minute and perishing planet is as brief
+as a dream.
+
+
+
+
+_The Voice of the World_
+
+
+"And what are you doing now?" The question of these school
+contemporaries of mine, and their greeting the other day in
+Piccadilly (I remember how shabby I felt as I stood talking
+to them)--for a day or two that question haunted me. And
+behind their well-bred voices I seemed to hear the voice of
+Schoolmasters and Tutors, of the Professional Classes, and
+indeed of all the world. What, as a plain matter of fact, was I
+doing, how did I spend my days? The life-days which I knew were
+numbered, and which were described in sermons and on tombstones
+as so irrevocable, so melancholy-brief.
+
+I decided to change my life. I too would be somebody in my time
+and age; my contemporaries should treat me as an important person.
+I began thinking of my endeavours, my studies by the midnight
+lamp, my risings at dawn for stolen hours of self-improvement.
+
+But alas, the day, the little day, was enough just then. It
+somehow seemed enough, just to be alive in the Spring, with the
+young green of the trees, the smell of smoke in the sunshine; I
+loved the old shops and books, the uproar darkening and
+brightening in the shabby daylight. Just a run of good-looking
+faces--and I was always looking for faces--would keep me amused.
+And London was but a dim-lit stage on which I could play in
+fancy any part I liked. I woke up in the morning like Byron to
+find myself famous; I was drawn like Chatham to St. Paul's, amid
+the cheers of the Nation, and sternly exclaimed with Cromwell,
+"Take away that bauble," as I sauntered past the Houses of
+Parliament.
+
+
+
+
+_And Anyhow_
+
+
+And anyhow, soon, so soon (in only seven million years or
+thereabouts the Encyclopaedia said) this Earth would grow cold,
+all human activities end, and the last wretched mortals freeze
+to death in the dim rays of the dying Sun.
+
+
+
+
+_Drawbacks_
+
+
+I should be all right.... If it weren't for these sudden
+visitations of Happiness, these downpourings of Heaven's blue,
+little invasions of Paradise, or waftings to the Happy Islands,
+or whatever you may call these disconcerting Moments, I should
+be like everybody else, and as blameless a rate-payer as any in
+our Row.
+
+
+
+
+_Talk_
+
+
+Once in a while, when doors are closed and curtains drawn on a
+group of free spirits, the miracle happens, and Good Talk
+begins. 'Tis a sudden illumination--the glow, it may be of
+sanctified candles, or, more likely, the blaze around a cauldron
+of gossip.
+
+Is there an ecstasy or any intoxication like it? Oh? to talk, to
+talk people into monsters, to talk one's self out of one's
+clothes, to talk God from His heaven, and turn everything in the
+world into a bright tissue of phrases!
+
+These Pentecosts and outpourings of the spirit can only occur
+very rarely, or the Universe itself would be soon talked out of
+existence.
+
+
+
+
+_The Church of England_
+
+
+I have my Anglican moments; and as I sat there that Sunday
+afternoon, in the Palladian interior of the London Church, and
+listened to the unexpressive voices chanting the correct service,
+I felt a comfortable assurance that we were in no danger of
+being betrayed into any unseemly manifestations of religious
+fervour. We had not gathered together at that performance
+to abase ourselves with furious hosannas before any dark
+Creator of an untamed Universe, no Deity of freaks and miracles
+and sinister hocus-pocus; but to pay our duty to a highly
+respected Anglican First Cause--undemonstrative, gentlemanly
+and conscientious--whom, without loss of self-respect, we
+could sincerely and decorously praise.
+
+
+
+
+_Misgiving_
+
+
+We were talking of people, and a name familiar to us all was
+mentioned. We paused and looked at each other; then soon, by
+means of anecdotes and clever touches, that personality was
+reconstructed, and seemed to appear before us, large, pink, and
+life-like, and gave a comic sketch of itself with appropriate
+poses.
+
+"Of course," I said to myself, "this sort of thing never happens
+to me." For the notion was quite unthinkable, the notion I mean
+of my own dear image, called up like this without my knowledge,
+to turn my discreet way of life into a cake-walk.
+
+
+
+
+_Sanctuaries_
+
+
+She said, "How small the world is after all!"
+
+I thought of China, of a holy mountain in the West of China,
+full of legends and sacred trees and demon-haunted caves. It
+is always enveloped in mountain mists; and in that white thick
+air I heard the faint sound of bells, and the muffled footsteps
+of innumerable pilgrims, and the reiterated mantra, _Nam-Mo,
+O-mi-to-Fo_, which they murmur as they climb its slopes. High
+up among its temples and monasteries marched processions of
+monks, with intoned services, and many prostrations, and lighted
+candles that glimmer through the fog. There in their solemn
+shrines stood the statues of the Arahats, and there, seated
+on his white elephant, loomed immense and dim, the image of
+Amitabha, the Lord of the Western Heavens.
+
+She said "Life is so complicated!" Climbing inaccessible cliffs
+of rock and ice, I shut myself within a Tibetan monastery beyond
+the Himalayan ramparts. I join with choirs of monks, intoning
+their deep sonorous dirges and unintelligible prayers; I beat
+drums, I clash cymbals, and blow at dawn from the Lamasery roofs
+conches, and loud discordant trumpets. And wandering through
+those vast and shadowy halls, as I tend the butter-lamps of the
+golden Buddhas, and watch the storms that blow across the barren
+mountains, I taste an imaginary bliss, and then pass on to other
+scenes and incarnations along the endless road that leads me to
+Nirvana.
+
+"But I do wish you would tell me what you really think?"
+
+I fled to Africa, into the depths of the dark Ashanti forest.
+There, in its gloomiest recesses, where the soil is stained with
+the blood of the negroes He has eaten, dwells that monstrous
+Deity of human shape and red colour, the great Fetish God,
+Sasabonsum. I like Sasabonsum: other Gods are sometimes moved to
+pity and forgiveness, but to Him such weakness is unknown. He is
+utterly and absolutely implacable; no gifts or prayers, no
+holocausts of human victims can appease, or ever, for one
+moment, propitiate Him.
+
+
+
+
+_Symptoms_
+
+
+"But there are certain people I simply cannot stand. A
+dreariness and sense of death come over me when I meet them--I
+really find it difficult to breathe when they are in the room,
+as if they had pumped all the air out of it. Wouldn't it
+be dreadful to produce that effect on people! But they never
+seem to be aware of it. I remember once meeting a famous
+Bore; I really must tell you about it, it shows the unbelievable
+obtuseness of such people."
+
+I told this and another story or two with great gusto, and talked
+on of my experiences and sensations, till suddenly I noticed, in
+the appearance of my charming neighbour, something--a slightly
+glazed look in her eyes, a just perceptible irregularity in her
+breathing--which turned that occasion for me into a kind of
+Nightmare.
+
+
+
+
+_Shadowed_
+
+
+I sometimes feel a little uneasy about that imagined self of
+mine--the Me of my daydreams--who leads a melodramatic life of
+his own, quite unrelated to my real existence. So one day I
+shadowed him down the street. He loitered along for a while, and
+then stood at a shop-window and dressed himself out in a gaudy
+tie and yellow waistcoat. Then he bought a great sponge and two
+stuffed birds and took them to lodgings, where he led for a
+while a shady existence. Next he moved to a big house in
+Mayfair, and gave grand dinner-parties, with splendid service
+and costly wines. His amorous adventures in this region I pass
+over. He soon sold his house and horses, gave up his motors,
+dismissed his retinue of servants, and went--saving two young
+ladies from being run over on the way--to live a life of heroic
+self-sacrifice among the poor.
+
+I was beginning to feel encouraged about him, when in passing a
+fishmonger's, he pointed at a great salmon and said, "I caught
+that fish."
+
+
+
+
+_The Incredible_
+
+
+"Yes, but they were rather afraid of you."
+
+"Afraid of _me_?"
+
+"Yes, so one of them told me afterwards."
+
+I was fairly jiggered. If my personality can inspire fear or
+respect the world must be a simpler place than I had thought it.
+Afraid of a shadow, a poor make-believe like me? Are children
+more absurdly terrified by a candle in a hollow turnip? Was
+Bedlam at full moon ever scared by anything half so silly?
+
+
+
+
+_Terror_
+
+
+A pause suddenly fell on our conversation--one of those
+uncomfortable lapses when we sit with fixed smiles, searching
+our minds for some remark with which to fill up the unseasonable
+silence. It was only a moment--"But suppose," I said to myself
+with horrible curiosity, "suppose none of us had found a word to
+say, and we had gone on sitting in silence?"
+
+It is the dread of Something happening, Something unknown and
+awful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk
+from dying out. So travellers at night in an unknown forest keep
+their fires ablaze, in fear of Wild Beasts lurking ready in the
+darkness to leap upon them.
+
+
+
+
+_Pathos_
+
+
+When winter twilight falls on my street with the rain, a sense
+of the horrible sadness of life descends upon me. I think of
+drunken old women who drown themselves because nobody loves
+them; I think of Napoleon at St. Helena, and of Byron growing
+morose and fat in the enervating climate of Italy.
+
+
+
+
+_Inconstancy_
+
+
+The rose that one wears and throws away, the friend one forgets,
+the music that passes--out of the well-known transitoriness of
+mortal things I have made myself a maxim or precept to the
+effect that it is foolish to look for one face, or to listen
+long for one voice, in a world that is after all, as I know,
+full of enchanting voices.
+
+But all the same, I can never quite forget the enthusiasm with
+which, as a boy, I read the praises of Constancy and True Love,
+and the unchanged Northern Star.
+
+
+
+
+_The Poplar_
+
+
+There is a great tree in Sussex, whose cloud of thin foliage
+floats high in the summer air. The thrush sings in it, and
+blackbirds, who fill the late, decorative sunshine with a
+shimmer of golden sound. There the nightingale finds her green
+cloister; and on those branches sometimes, like a great fruit,
+hangs the lemon-coloured Moon. In the glare of August, when all
+the world is faint with heat, there is always a breeze in those
+cool recesses, always a noise, like the noise of water, among
+its lightly hung leaves.
+
+But the owner of this Tree lives in London, reading books.
+
+
+
+
+_On the Doorstep_
+
+
+I rang the bell as of old; as of old I gazed at the great
+shining Door and waited. But, alas! that flutter and beat of the
+wild heart, that delicious doorstep Terror--it was gone; and
+with it dear, fantastic, panic-stricken Youth had rung the bell,
+flitted round the corner and vanished for ever.
+
+
+
+
+_Old Clothes_
+
+
+Shabby old waistcoat, what made the heart beat that you used to
+cover? Funny-shaped hat, where are the thoughts that once nested
+beneath you? Old shoes, hurrying along what dim paths of the
+Past did I wear out your sole-leather?
+
+
+
+
+_Youth_
+
+
+Oh dear, this living and eating and growing old; these doubts
+and aches in the back, and want of interest in the Moon and
+Roses...
+
+Am I the person who used to wake in the middle of the night and
+laugh with the joy of living? Who worried about the existence of
+God, and danced with young ladies till long after daybreak? Who
+sang "Auld Lang Syne" and howled with sentiment, and more than
+once gazed at the summer stars through a blur of great, romantic
+tears?
+
+
+
+
+_Consolation_
+
+
+The other day, depressed on the Underground, I tried to cheer
+myself by thinking over the joys of our human lot. But there
+wasn't one of them for which I seemed to care a hang--not
+Wine, nor Friendship, nor Eating, nor Making Love, nor the
+Consciousness of Virtue. Was it worth while then going up in
+a lift into a world that had nothing less trite to offer?
+
+Then I thought of reading--the nice and subtle happiness of
+reading. This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this
+polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene, life-long
+intoxication.
+
+
+
+
+_Sir Eustace Carr_
+
+
+When I read the news about Sir Eustace Carr in the morning
+paper, I was startled, like everyone else who knew, if only by
+name this young man, whose wealth and good looks, whose
+adventurous travels and whose brilliant and happy marriage, had
+made of him an almost romantic figure.
+
+Every now and then one hears of some strange happening of this
+kind. But they are acts so anomalous, in such startling
+contradiction to all our usual ways and accepted notions of life
+and its value, that most of us are willing enough to accept the
+familiar explanation of insanity, or any other commonplace cause
+which may be alleged--financial trouble, or some passionate
+entanglement, and the fear of scandal and exposure. And then the
+Suicide is forgotten as soon as possible, and his memory
+shuffled out of the way as something unpleasant to think of. But
+with a curiosity that is perhaps a little morbid, I sometimes
+let my thoughts dwell on these cases, wondering whether the dead
+man may not have carried to the grave with him the secret of
+some strange perplexity, some passion or craving or irresistible
+impulse, of which perhaps his intimates, and certainly the
+coroner's jury, can have had no inkling.
+
+I had never met or spoken to Sir Eustace Carr--the worlds we
+lived in were very different--but I had read of his explorations
+in the East, and of the curious tombs he had discovered--somewhere,
+was it not?--in the Nile Valley. Then too it happened (and this
+was the main cause of my interest) that at one time I had seen
+him more than once, under circumstances that were rather unusual.
+And now I began to think of this incident. In away it was nothing,
+and yet the impression haunted me that it was somehow connected
+with this final act, for which no explanation, beyond that of
+sudden mental derangement, had been offered. This explanation did
+not seem to me wholly adequate, although it had been accepted,
+I believe, both by his friends and the general public--and with
+the more apparent reason on account of a strain of eccentricity,
+amounting in some cases almost to insanity, which could be traced,
+it was said, in his mother's family.
+
+I found it not difficult to revive with a certain vividness the
+memory of those cold and rainy November weeks that I had
+happened to spend alone, some years ago, in Venice, and of the
+churches which I had so frequently haunted. Especially I
+remembered the great dreary church in the piazza near my
+lodgings, into which I would often go on my way to my rooms in
+the twilight. It was the season when all the Venice churches are
+draped in black, and services for the dead are held in them at
+dawn and twilight; and when I entered this Baroque interior,
+with its twisted columns and volutes and high-piled, hideous
+tombs, adorned with skeletons and allegorical figures and angels
+blowing trumpets--all so agitated, and yet all so dead and empty
+and frigid--I would find the fantastic darkness filled with
+glimmering candles, and kneeling figures, and the discordant
+noise of chanting. There I would sit, while outside night fell
+with the rain on Venice; the palaces and green canals faded into
+darkness, and the great bells, swinging against the low sky,
+sent the melancholy sound of their voices far over the lagoons.
+
+It was here, in this church, that I used to see Sir Eustace Carr;
+would generally find him in the same corner when I entered, and
+would sometimes watch his face, until the ceremonious extinguishing
+of the candles, one by one, left us in shadowy night. It was a
+handsome and thoughtful face, and I remember more than once
+wondering what had brought him to Venice in that unseasonable
+month, and why he came so regularly to this monotonous service.
+It was as if some spell had drawn him; and now, with my curiosity
+newly wakened, I asked myself what had been that spell? I also
+must have been affected by it, for I had been there also in his
+uncommunicating company. Here, I felt, was perhaps the answer to
+my question, the secret of the enigma that puzzled me; and as I
+went over my memories of that time, and revived its sombre and
+almost sinister fascination, I seemed to see an answer looming
+before my imagination. But it was an answer, an hypothesis or
+supposition, so fantastic, that my common sense could hardly
+accept it.
+
+For I now saw that the spell which had been on us both at that
+time in Venice had been nothing but the spell and tremendous
+incantation of the Thought of Death. The dreary city with its
+decaying palaces and great tomb-encumbered churches had really
+seemed, in those dark and desolate weeks, to be the home and
+metropolis of the great King of Terrors; and the services at
+dawn and twilight, with their prayers for the Dead, and funereal
+candles, had been the chanted ritual of his worship. Now suppose
+(such was the notion that held my imagination) suppose this
+spell, which I had felt but for a time and dimly, should become to
+someone a real obsession, casting its shadow more and more completely
+over a life otherwise prosperous and happy, might not this be the
+clue to a history like that of Sir Eustace Carr's--not only his
+interest in the buried East, his presence at that time in Venice,
+but also his unexplained and mysterious end?
+
+Musing on this half-believed notion, I thought of the great
+personages and great nations we read of in ancient history, who
+have seemed to live with a kind of morbid pleasure in the shadow
+of this great Thought; who have surrounded themselves with
+mementoes of Death, and hideous symbols of its power, and who,
+like the Egyptians, have found their main interest, not in the
+present, but in imaginary explorations of the unknown future;
+not on the sunlit surface of this earth, but in the vaults and
+dwelling-places of the Dead beneath it.
+
+Since this preoccupation, this curiosity, this nostalgia, has
+exercised so enormous a fascination in the past, I found it not
+impossible to imagine some modern favourite of fortune falling a
+victim to this malady of the soul; until at last, growing weary
+of other satisfactions, he might be drawn to open for himself
+the dark portal and join the inhabitants of that dim region,
+"Kings and Counsellors of the earth, Princes that had gold, who
+filled their houses with silver." This, as I say, was the notion
+that haunted me, the link my imagination forged between Sir
+Eustace Carr's presence in that dark Venetian church, and his
+self-caused death some years later. But whether it is really a
+clue to that unexplained mystery, or whether it is nothing more
+than a somewhat sinister fancy, of course, I cannot say.
+
+
+
+
+_The Lord Mayor_
+
+
+An arctic wind was blowing; it cut through me as I stood there.
+The boot-black was finishing his work and complaints.
+
+"But I should be 'appy, sir, if only I could make four bob a
+day," he said.
+
+I looked down at him; it seemed absurd, the belief of this
+crippled, half-frozen creature, that four-shillings would make
+him happy. Happiness! the fabled treasure of some far-away
+heaven I thought it that afternoon; not to be bought with gold,
+not of this earth!
+
+I said something to this effect. But four shillings a day was
+enough for the boot-black.
+
+"Why," he said, "I should be as 'appy as the Lord Mayor!"
+
+
+
+
+_The Burden_
+
+
+I know too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History
+and Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over
+books; believing in geological periods, cave-dwellers, Chinese
+Dynasties, and the fixed stars has prematurely aged me.
+
+Why am I to blame for all that is wrong in the world? I didn't
+invent Sin and Hate and Slaughter. Who made it my duty anyhow
+to administer the Universe, and keep the planets to their
+Copernican courses? My shoulders are bent beneath the weight
+of the firmament; I grow weary of propping up, like Atlas,
+this vast and erroneous Cosmos.
+
+
+
+
+_Under An Umbrella_
+
+
+From under the roof of my umbrella I saw the washed pavement
+lapsing beneath my feet, the news-posters lying smeared with
+dirt at the crossings, the tracks of the busses in the liquid
+mud. On I went through this dreary world of wetness. And
+through how many rains and years shall I still hurry down
+wet streets--middle-aged, and then, perhaps, very old? And
+on what errands?
+
+Asking myself this cheerless question I fade from your vision,
+Reader, into the distance, sloping my umbrella against the wind.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith
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