Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/294

262 and prophetic. Some day he goes out into the city to listen to its voices. And when he tires of the voices and enters again into the quiet cathedral, a very old man, the statues are all fallen down from their pedestals, and he walks among their ruins where he walked many years before.

Thus we hear the voices of thoughts calling, insistent, incomprehensible. They call to us in appeal, their questioning livens the dark not only the voices of the shapes that we have passed within the staunch reality of the day, but the voices of the shapes that outnumber these, the shapes of loneliness and disillusion, and the wordless voices of those two are terrible. Our reveries are importuned by the past and the future, by that eternal future that we will not forget, by that eternal past that we cannot forget.

What else is there worth living or learning or laughing for, but forgetfulness? Expedient forgetfulness! Old successes come to be standards against our failures, old energies against our new fatigues; old happy moods become slight-pained regrets, and age laughs sadly at unwise, dear youth. Men swerved in the all-desire to forget, embrace oblivion, and they are wise. Forgetfulness is a blessing, like the blessing of whole-hearted, unweary laughter to a world-tired man.

But, my friend, thoughts, too sad thoughts, have dulled the world to the shade of ashes and disappointment, and we are become old too young. There are autumn leaves in the bowls of our spirits, withered flame of bright colour. We have lived too much with books, and books eat out a man's youth; a spell of other days and other lives winds him in the melodious woof of dreams, and modern thoughts drown and die away in the unnoticed sound of modern years. To such minds the stones that bore the tops of history's heels are not mere paving-stones, and in all places where

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