Transcribed from the 1893 John Lane edition , emailccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Contents
The Rhythm of Life
Decivilised
A Remembrance
The Sun
The Flower
Unstable Equilibrium
The Unit of the World
By the Railway Side
Pocket Vocabularies
Pathos
The Point of Honour
Composure
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
James Russell Lowell
Domus Angusta
Rejection
The Lesson of Landscape
Mr. Coventry Patmore’s Odes
Innocence and Experience
Penultimate Caricature
If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicityrules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of theorbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses notmeasured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless,the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or lastyear, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week ornext year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends uponthe tides of the mind. Disease is metrical, closing in at shorterand shorter periods towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and longerintervals towards recovery. Sorrow for one cause was intolerableyesterday, and will be intolerable tomorrow; today it is easy to bear,but the cause has not passed. Even the burden of a spiritual distressunsolved is bound to leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorseitself does not remain—it returns. Gaiety takes us by adear surprise. If we had made a course of notes of its visits,we might have been on the watch, and would have had an expectation insteadof a discovery. No one makes such observations; in all the diariesof students of the interior world, there have never come to light therecords of the Kepler of such cycles. But Thomas à Kempisknew of the recurrences, if he did not measure them. In his cellalone with the elements—‘What wouldst thou more than these?for out of these were all things made’—he learnt the stayto be found in the depth of the hour of bitterness, and the remembrancethat restrains the soul at the coming of the moment of delight, givingit a more conscious welcome, but presaging for it an inexorable flight. And ‘rarely, rarely comest thou,’ sighed Shelley, not toDelight merely, but to the Spirit of Delight. Delight can be compelledbeforehand, called, and constrained to our service—Ariel can bebound to a daily task; but such artificial violence throws life outof metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus compelled. Thatflits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or hyperbolicallycurved, keeping no man knows what trysts with Time.
It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the Imitationshould both have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights,and to guess at the order of this periodicity. Both souls werein close touch with the spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberatehuman rules, no infractions of the liberty and law of the universalmovement, kept from them the knowledge of recurrences. Eppursi muove. They knew that presence does not existwithout absence; they knew that what is just upon its flight of farewellis already on its long path of return. They knew that what isapproaching to the very touch is hastening towards departure. ‘O wind,’ cried Shelley, in autumn,
‘O wind,
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’
They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interruptwith unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse ofonset and retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement. To livein constant efforts after an equal life, whether the equality be soughtin mental production, or in spiritu