Vanishing Roads and Other Essays

has a stern, fateful sound, suggestive of momentous opportunity fast slipping away, opportunity that can never come aga

ch, indeed, has come of a suggestiveness in the cry beyond the occasion, a sense conveyed by the words, in combination with the swift speeding along of the train, of the inexorable swift passage and gliding away of all things. Ah! so soon it will be the last call-for so many pleasant things-that we would fain arrest and enjoy a little longer in a world that

mmer woodlands, with all their pomp and riot of exuberant green and gold, are anything but safe from this low sweet singing, and in the white arms of beauty, pressed desperately close as if to imprison the divine fugitive moment, the song seems to come nearest. Who has not held some loved face in his hands, and gazed

morning take

world be up

ght be turned

illows on t

ugh its poets may warn it that "youth's a stuff does not endure," it doesn't seriously believe it. Others may have come to an end of their cake, but its cake is going to last for ever. Alas, for the day when it is borne in upon us with a tragic suddenness, like a miser who awakens to find that he has been robbed of his hoard, that un

es, or they have possessed a great art in the eating of it. Though I may add here that a cautious husbanding of your cake is no good way. That way you are liable to find it grown mouldy on your hands. No, oddly enough, it is often seen that those who all their lives have

grave. For them that last call is apt to come usually before sunset-and the great American question arises: What are they going to do about it? That, of course, e

we actually do, from a nervous sense that it is about time for it to sound. Our hair perhaps is growing gr

ime to

ke in

ns and superstitions, both habits may be prolonged far beyond the moping limits of custom, and need never be abandoned unless we become sincerely and unregretfully tired of them. I can we

the end of the chapter. No wonder that some, hearing this dread sentence, go half crazy in a frenzied effort to clutch at what remains, run amok, so to say, in their despairing determination to have, if need be, a last "good time" and die. Their efforts are apt to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and the world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of the "romantic" outbursts of aging people. For myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender sympathy. I know that they have heard that last fearful

, and are now fain to begin living when it is too late, that last call comes indeed with a ghastly irony. But for those who have fearlessly lived their lives, as they came along, with Catullus singing their vivamus atque amemus, and practising it, too; for those, if indeed the last call must come, they will be able to support it by the thought that, often as in the past life has called to them, it has never called to them in vain. We are apt sometimes to belittle ou

ke all, Galilean

not

lms and the paean,

in th

r middle age. I regret the paradoxical form these platitudes have unconsciously taken, for that they are the simplest truth any honest dying man would tell you. And that phrase recalls a beautiful poem by "E. Nesbit" which has haunted me all my life, a poem I shall beg leave to quote here

me balmy s

ross the moo

shining se

scales and

ould y

uld b

ears and s

uld leap i

he seamaid

thus were st

ells woven of

sure that yo

backward loo

k back, my d

t into the

safely

to my dy

moment do we receive back all it has to give us, and by the active receptivity of our natures attract toward us other such moments, as it were, out of the sky. An ever-rea

ears his fa

eserts a

not put it

or los

favourite dictum of Grant Allen's,-is growing more and more to be the formula of the modern world; and, if a certain amount of self-sacrifice is of necessity included in a healthy self-development, the proportion is being reduced to a rational limit. One form of self-sacrifice, at all events, is no longer demanded of us-the wholesale sacrifice of our own opinions. The possibility that there may be two opinions or a dozen or a hundred on one matter, and that they may be all different, yet each one of them right in its proper application, has dawned forcibly on the world, with the conception of the relativity of experience and the modification of conditions. Nowadays we recognize that there are as many "rights" and as many "wrongs" as there are individuals; and to be

hands before t

d I am read

er there was any piece of wildness afoot he was always found in the thick of it. When the bacchantes were out on Mount Cithaeron, and the mad Evoe! Evoe! rang through the moonstruck woods, be sure he was up and away, with ardent hands clutched in the flying tresses. Ah! the vine leaves and the tiger skins and the ivory bodies, the clash of the cymbals and the dithyramb shri

quite possible for a lifelong passion for fair women to become insensibly and unregretfully transmuted into a passion for first editions, and you may become quite sincerely content that a younger fellow catch the flying maiden, if only you can catch yon flitting butterfly for your collection. And, strangest of all, your grand passion for your own remarkable self

the nymph in the brake" and "the chimes at midnight" were not for you. And there is a menacing murmur of autumn in the air. The days are shortening, and the twilight comes early, with a chilly breath. The crickets have stopped singing, and the garden is sad with elegiac blooms. The chrysanthemum is growing on the grave of the rose. Perhaps already it is too late-too late for

slip a little

it will not