Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/298

266 transition, leaving a sentence as an epitaph. Sometimes the course of nations crimsons at their setting, sometimes it fades like a twilight. A man being thought of as one, and as of a single impressiveness, his loss passes on with him and with him is forgotten, but a nation being a union of many voices becomes suddenly impressive when it breaks, the voices scattering. Nations roar to their finish, or change and grow indistinct as when one river joins another.

Death is always a tragedy because of its possibilities perhaps it is change, perhaps oblivion, and the former is the more tragical, for when things change away and confute memory by dissemblance it is more pitiful than when they fall, becoming memories. Sometimes nations die of their own satisfaction, and the strength grown vigorous in combating adversity sinks into listlessness in their ease; so, they decline of their own content, and die, like over-feeding men in an after-dinner mood.

Race, which is below nations, rests unseen for the reason of the silence, yet when, in its time, this deeper vitality that evolves nations, speaks, methods of rule are powerless, and governors seem insignificant.

When that great captive animal we call a people roars its fatigue the voices of the trainers are lost; when race grows feeble and old, the noise of government sinks into complaining.

Surely history, who was born old, is very tired, tired with the fatigue of the ages and their unoriginality, tired and sick, and sorrowful with knowledge of men. She has been so long ring master in the circus of the generations, watching their ceaseless round to the cracked old music of the years, God must seem very cruel to her.

You feel the balancing of the centuries very delicately, my friend, and their results are finely weighed in your understanding,

Rh