Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/291

Rh weary we are, and you have seen our sorrow in the age's dissolution, that man can not reverse time s glass when the sands run out. But you have not found music enough in the world's applause to care to listen for it, and you are so sad that you have become friendly with fatigue.

Oh, my friend, is there anything piteous like the piteousness of life, life that stretches its hands to the empty sky and says "I came from yonder, take me back again"? And old Hope has blind beautiful eyes and smiles, and Sorrow's eyes are deep with sight, and she is always young.

Are you so spiritual that you feel the pain of the world's look? Does it see more than the reflection of itself? The world is a great dreamer though it credits only its exceptions with its dreams.

Facts and reasons we acquire and leave off again, their use dead. Experience is impersonal, only our applications of it become any kin to us. Time fades out of us the distinctness of old things, merging them in association in his shadow reason's right is mixed with living's wrong, and what has stood large and plain is fore-shortened into dimness in the years; it is events that stretch the spaces in memory. We know only the midway of things and the beginnings and endings are in the dark; for man's knowledge is a lantern that he himself carries and the light falls round him. All this the world knows is true.

But when we hear youth calling, and, turning our heads, find that we are old, we take a landscape view of life, and we realise that our light has been the light of dreams, and with the puny lantern of our wisdom we have been groping in an unknown country and have not seen the sun.

Life tyrannises over us; ambition leads us on for ever after the illusive music of success played by the eternal invisible minstrels. Rh