The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax

through earth a

not-but many

d, Leviatha

m, and jellie

upward through

unds, potential

im Forefather

ssed Him: 'All

ust or ride a

ese and these! B

lk as well as any ordinary grasshopper does (and without half trying) could make two hundred and fifty feet at a step. There is no denying, of course, that the man does it, after his fashion, but he has to have a trolley to do it with. The man seems to prefer, as a rule, to use things outside to get what he wants inside. He has a way of making everything outside him serve him as if he had it on h

and body seem to be perfectly matched. He has his soul and body all on. It is probably the best (and the worst) th

ind of practical joke, in the presence of the other animals, on the rest of us. It looks as if He had suddenly decided at the very moment he was in the middle of making a body for a man, that out of all the animals man should be immortal-and had let it go at that. With the exception of the giraffe and perhaps the goose or camel and an extra fold or so in the hippopotamus, we are easily the strangest, t

or in our more infinite relations. Our matter may not be very well arranged on us, perhaps, but we flatter ourselves that there is a superior unseen spiritual quality in it. It takes seers or surgeons to appreciate us-more of the same sort, etc. In the meantime (no man can deny the way things look) here we all are, with our queer, pale, little stretched-out legs and arms and things, floundering about on this earth, without even our clothes on, covering ourselves as best we can. And what could really be funnier than a human body living before The Great Sun under its frame of wood and glass, all winter and all summer ... strange and bleached-looking, like celery, grown almost always under cloth, kept in the kind of cellar of cotton or wool it likes for itself, moving about or being moved about, the way it is, in thousands of queer, dependent, helpless-looking ways? The earth, we can we

really lives, one sees very plainly that all that he has been allowed is a mere suggestion or hint of a body, a sort of central nerve or ganglion for his real self. A seed or spore of infinity, blown down on a star-held there by the grip, apparently, of Nothing-a human body is path

n. Helpless and unfinished-looking as it is, when I look upon it, I have seen the animals slinking to their holes before it, and worshipping, or

th. They hasten on glimmering trains out through the dark. Soon the newsboys shrill in the streets-China and the Philippines and Australia, and East and West they cry-the voices of the nations of the earth, and in my soul I worship the body of the man. Have I not seen two trains full of the will

ce of the hills, nor feel the earth around me growing softly or resting in the light, lifting itself to live. All that is, all that reaches out around me, is the body of the man. One must look up to stars and beyond horizons to look in his face. Who is there, I have said, that shall trace upon the earth the footsteps of this body, all wireles

? I am always coming suddenly upon my body, crying out

I have wondered, a man in

Time and Space. Who is there who has not seen it, if only through the peephole of a dream-the whole earth lying still and strange in the hollow of his hand, the sea waiting upon him? Th

the seas

huttl

ets long,

and-s

king, half

calms and s

old and

heavenly-

and shudd

y star

glow of s

ing

and

the

ately

and

by

thest bounds of

of Days

es

a fit subject for poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging for myself. I have seen the few poets of this modern world crowded into their corner of it (in Westminster Abbey), and I have seen also a great foundry chiming its

ed to see the man wondering at it. But he puts up his hands to his eyes, or he is merely hammering on something. Then I wish that some one would be born for him, and write a book for him, a book that should come upon the man and fold him in like a cl

ike spirits

ad a time-table. When I put

carry in my pocket

ve made dreams pale and small. What is wanted now