Page:Later Life (1919).djvu/247

Rh and passionate; a longing to be sought himself, for once in his life; to see arms opened to him this time, waiting to embrace him, to press him to a loving heart. . . . A feeling of melancholy softened him, made him small and human, while the mountain-wind swept past on giant wings. . ..

He looked back upon his life. That was one thing which it had never known: that concentration of all feeling on an individual. With him, any whole-hearted feeling had always been for the many. When he looked back, he saw spectres wandering through the past: the individual, the unit, just a faint blur here and there; he had never felt that all-devouring passion for them, the individuals. And yet, as a child, as a boy, playing his dream-game amid woods, fields, heather and stream, for whom had his longing been? To find all of them, humanity, or the one individual soul? He did not know, but a dreamer he had always remained, for all his thinking and doing. And now, after the many had brought him sorrow, he began to dream, for the first time, of the one. ..

Of the one. . . the one individual soul that would open wide arms to him and approach him with a loving embrace. . . one individual soul. . . . Had his quest always been the self-deception of impotence and was it possible that now that quest had become a search for the one individual soul? Suddenly, through his longing, he remembered an