Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/139

 Mr. Stevenson's Forerunner

By James Ashcroft Noble

a long time—I can hardly give a number to its years—I have been haunted by a spectre of duty. Of late the visitations of the haunter have recurred with increasing frequency and added persistence of appeal; and though, like Hamlet, I have long dallied with the ghostly behest, like him I am at last compelled to obedience. Ghosts, I believe, have a habit of putting themselves in evidence for the purpose of demanding justice, and my ghost makes no display of originality: in this respect he follows the time-honoured example of his tribe, and if peace of mind is to return to me the exorcism of compliance must needs be uttered.

Emerson in one of his gnomic couplets proclaims his conviction that

a saying which, shorn of its imaginative wings and turned into a pedestrian colloquialism, reads something like this—"What deserves to live the world will not let die." It is a comforting belief, yet there are times when Tennyson's vision of the "fifty seeds" out of which Nature "often brings but one to bear," seems nearer to the common truth of things; and all the world's heedfulness