Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/289



By R. V. Risley

, the years to you have been Autumnal, and when the war-horns of life are filled with dust you will not be frightened at the silence. Do you still feel the want for remembrance, the horror of the future's indifference? Do the faded figures experience has woven into the tapestry of your days still keep a reality for you that makes you sad to leave them? Do you dread the cold dark and the changelessness of oblivion?

For some lives the world is a waste of every-days that are all accounted for by mean causes and are useless and without a significant great end. And some lives are for ever haunted by an unattainable triumph that is for ever a little beyond — and beyond. But you have been interested in things as a sad, wise man, and yet have heard no loud ambition calling. A nature that realises sadness is never expressive, and its depths exist in silence and hide away from men. So, your life has been on the defensive, and in your isolation you have been mournfully unprotected against dreams. Your instinct of knowledge allowed you illusive consolations, and loneliness, the loneliness that dwells upon the altitudes, the loneliness of a wise mind, interpreted mankind to you.

Hope is God's jest and Memory His curse: but Indifference is Rh