Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/195

Rh the hour, we children of this world, wiser in our day and generation, seeing that the shapes of folly or sin which these faults took upon themselves were due to none but us. Child that he was, and child of light, we wrinkled denizens of the darkness vexed and tortured him with our unendurable egotisms, our hateful exigencies. But now we know him better. Life is life, and, in the terrible struggle of our kind, benefactors and malefactors must be judged—can alone be judged—by the strict rules of the game. We cannot call him great; but is it nothing to say of his spirit that it was lovely? We cannot take his larger labours seriously: they are not lasting contributions to our exiguous store of deathless achievement; but is it nothing to say that the vision of this radiant and lovely soul in its halcyon hours has filled us again and again with a new sense of the beauty and value of life? Is it nothing to say that a handful of his lyrics gives us a delicate music, a subtle perfume, that are too rare and too exquisite for either us or those who come after us ever to forget?