Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/297

Rh become stages where our whims dance to the world's amusement. The various moods of our lives colour our souls with shades of impression, till memory in the years becomes tinged like the fiery afternoon woods in the autumn.

But loneliness is colourless, and remains as a shadow, for ever breeding strength. It is only in loneliness that a soul becomes defensive, as it is only in the silence of a great tragedy that it becomes impregnable. The growth of deep power in a mind implies a shady place aside from the surface sunlight of the day's events, a secret city in one's nature away from the noises of exterior happenings.

I know a story of a man who became divine in loneliness one night on the long sand, where the solemn thought of the sea spoke in a whisper. But afterwards he could not express the divinity he had understood, but he laughed his way through life to no tense purpose among the every-days. Once the midnight questioned him in the Fall of the year, and he answered that he had become a part of that divinity and could not speak. Surely all of us have one time understood a divinity that eludes expression. We feel it possible to be our best, but the harmony of our souls is broken by the discords of life, which demand loudly, and give no care to the hesitating depths of thought that stand always upon the threshold. Perhaps we are all the trumpets of the Deity, but we cannot speak what the invisible lips have breathed into our being. Possibly we are all beautiful each with a self beauty of our own, only circumstance spoils us.

We see this more easily in looking at the organised crowds of prejudices called Nations.

Nations die, some violently, struggling against outward causes, and their fall is noticed, making a page of battles in history; some slowly, and like a very old man, and their end comes as a Rh