Vanishing Roads and Other Essays

in which I am writing lies in a trance of green and gold, hot and fragrant and dizzy with the whirring of cicadas, under the might of the July sun. Bees buzz in and out through my door, and s

than wild hone

n Rome to Le

eemed like a miracle, and it was impossible to realize that under the broad snowdrifts a million seeds, like hidden treasure, were waiting to reveal their painted jewels to the April winds. Snow was plentiful then, to be had by the ton-but now, the thought suddenly strikes me, and brings home with new illuminating force Villon's old refrain, that though I sought the woodland from end to end,

irreclaimable vanished things than that s

sk this week

e gone, nor y

us much for

the snows of

and pomp of the earth-"pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, hey!" "Ah! where is the doughty Charlemagne?" They, even as the humblest, "the wind has carried them all away." They have vanished utterly as the snow, gone-w

he mad wo

drift

tune,

e dead a

the same time an undeniable charm attaching to those moods of imaginative retrospect in which we summon up shapes and

a name huddled with a thousand such in some dusty index, seldom turned to even by the scholar, and as unknown to the world at large as the moss-grown name on some sunken headstone in a country churchyard. What an appallingly exuberant and spendthrift universe it seems, pouring out its multitudinous generations of men and women with the same wasteful hand as it has filled

ge, and in what tremendous dramas have they taken part! And how strange it is, reading some great dramatic career, of Caesar, say, or Luther, or Napoleon, or Byron, to realize that there was a time when they were not, then a time when they were beginning to be strange new names in men's ears, then all the romantic excitement of their developing destinies, and the thunder and light

place, just as at the moment of my writing other things are taking place, and clocks were ticking and water flowing, just as they are doing now! How wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then, as we are alive now, to have shared in those vast national enthusiasms, "in those great deeds to have had some little part"; and is it

I imagine, such retrospect is usually busied with some fair face, or perhaps-being men-with several fair faces, once so near and dear, and now so far. How poignantly and unprofitably real memory can make them-all but bring them back-how viv

ghter, yet never took our eyes from each other; and, when the meal was ended, how we wandered along the stream-side down the rocky glen, till we came to an enchanted pool among

n the far past; you will sit right away on the lonely outside of it, and recall it only with the anguish of bea

hat haunted pool just the same as when-but where are the laughing ripples-ah! Miranda-that broke with laughter over the divinely

ith last y

Ah! how was it we lingered and lingered till the boat was no more there, and it was too late? Perhaps it was that we seemed to be already there, as you turned and placed your hand in mine and said: "My life is in your hand." And we both believed it true. Yes! wherever we went together in those days, we were always in that enchanted land-whether we rode side by side through London streets in a hansom-"a two-wheeled heaven" we called it-(for our dream stretches as far back as that prehistoric day-How old one of us seems to be growing! You, dear face, can never grow old)-or sat and laughed at clowns in London music halls, or wandered in Surrey lanes, or gazed a

mortality with super-terrestrial states of being. We do, in very deed, gaze through invisible doors into the ether of eternal existences, and, for the brief hour, live as they, drinking deep of that music of the infinite which is the divine food of the enfranchised soul. Thence comes our exaltation, and

, nor would we miss one note of his strange song. But alas! now that we are grown wise and watchful, that "moment eternal" comes to us no more. Perhaps too that sad wisdom which has come to us with the years would least of all avail us, should such moments by some magic chance suddenly return. For it is one of the dangers of the retrospective habit that it incapacitates us for the realization of the present hour. Much dwelling on last year's snow will make us forget the summer flowers. Dreaming of fair faces that are gone, we will look with unseeing eyes into the fair faces that companion us still. To the Spring we say: "What of

kiss se

st kiss and for

nd sicklies o'er every action of him whom l

feet. But for some of us there is nothing quite so sad as young joy. The playing of children is perhaps the most unbearably sad thing in the world. Who can look on young lovers, without tears in their eyes? With what innocent faith they are taking in all the radiant lies

sionize, to create loveliness in order to scatter it to the winds, and inspire joy in order to mock it with desolation. Sometimes it seems as though the mysterious spirit of life was hardly worthy of the vessels it has called into being, hardly treats them fairly, uses them with an ignoble disdain. For, how generously we give ourselv

houghts of such manifest immortalities. The snows of yester-year! Who knows if, after all, they have so utterly vanished as they seem. Who can say but that there may be somewhere in the universe secret treasuries where all that has ever been precious is precious still, safely garnered and

eliness of flo

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their passion

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rayed for some po

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and fame ind

sure thing in

st and lovely things when we come at