Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/296

264 You, my friend, see books from the standpoint of men, knowing men too well. Sorrow sees deep and is kind, and you know men yet you care for them. Yet surely it is more easy to feel friendly towards nations, for History is a cold-voiced minstrel, and her nonsense seems unhuman, and her griefs and laughter come from very far away.

People are like the weather. Some discourage us into departure for sunnier climates by their overcoat faces, some soothe us into resistance by their long-drawn content, till our levelled senses ache for a discord, but these are sordid, stupid men the temples in whose minds were built with closed doors; and the stupid man is his own contentment, as a great man is his own destiny.

A few cold winds have lifted voices sweet with the chill, pure wonder of the dawning air, and have spoken of the creations of their minds and called them loves. We have not such loves. Some men are blessed with never finding out that ideals live only in the ideal. The little door of Heaven does not turn on its hinges of light to our knocking, and only a ray of the luminous beyond steals out to us under its threshold.

A few men whose minds are dark with sorrows and whose laughters are all asleep have spoken in huge, soft organ tones, and made the world colder in the shadow of their everlasting pain as when a great berg passes by on the ocean in the dark.

But we cannot live upon the altitudes; our minds seek the balance of the valleys, and in our life's ending we see that the sum of the year's exaltations and depressions is nearly a level, and feel that it is well if our path has inclined but a little upward.

All great thoughts are sad because they are lonely, and there are only two whole, lonely joys, that of creation and that of destruction.

We try for distinction from the men about us, and our minds

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