Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/173

 substances introduce me to swarms of men, before unrealised. And they all lived and died, and cared for their children, or not, and led reasonable lives, or not: and, without any alternative, had casual thoughts and constant passions. Did each one of them ever stop in his work, and think that the world revolved about him alone; and all was his, and for him? Most men may have thought so, and shivered a little afterwards; and worked on steadily. Or did each one of them ever think that he was always beset with companions, hordes of men and women, necessary and inevitable? Then, he must have struggled a little in his mind, as a man fights for air, and worked on steadily. It does not do: this interrogation of mysteries, which are also facts. Nor am I called upon, from without or from within, to write an Essay upon the Problem of Economic Distribution. Præsentia temnis! Nature says to me: it is the stir of the world, and the great play of forces, that I am wailing, to no end. Let the great life continue, and the sun shine upon bright palaces; and geraniums, red geraniums, glow at the windows of dingy courts; death and sorrow come upon both, and upon me. And on all sides there is infinite tenderness; the invincible good-will, which says kind and cheerful things to every one sometimes, by a friend's mouth; the humane pieties of the world, which make glad the Civitas Dei, and make endurable the Regnum Hominis. I need not make myself miserable.

Full night at last; the dead of night, as dull folk have it; ignorant persons, who know nothing of nocturnal beauty, of night's lively magic. It was a good thought, to come out of my lonely room, to look at the cloisters by moonlight, and to wander round the Close, under the black shadows of the buttresses, while the moon is white upon their strange pinnacles. There is no noise, but only a silence, which seems very old; old, as the grey monu-