Page:Firecrackers a realistic novel.pdf/119

 the leaves of The Soliloquies of a Hermit. Several passages were marked: Love one another an impossible ideal. . . people that claw and tear at each other. They steal the moods of God. They do not permit the moods of God to pour freely through them and go. . . . Man is a collection of atoms through which pass the moods of God—a terrible clay picture, tragic, frail, drunken, but always deep rooted in the earth, always with claws holding on to his life while the moods pass over him and change his face and his life every moment. . . . To have the soul and teeth of a lion and the body of a tramp, is the way to tread on this world as it ought to be trodden on. . . . There is something very ugly about the immortal part of a man—his greed, his getting on, his self-sacrifice, his giving to the poor. I suppose there can be nothing beautiful in anything that has gone on a long while without changing; it is only the ugly part of us that can live through so many centuries of flesh and blood. . . . Only at times under His yoke I have been allowed to take a little nectar from the flowers; I have hidden my hand in a waterfall of brown hair; I have caught a hurried kiss from a breathing sunbeam. This is all we can have—all. It is impossible to get more out of the world than it can give. It is best to ruminate like a cow. . . . That is the way of the world, and it happens like that because man's mind can only go to a certain point, and then it breaks. Every mind breaks when it does more than