e beauty, it makes one pause and grow
silent, as in the long hushed galleries of the Vatican one pauses and
grows silent before some little known, scarcely-catalogued Greek
Vase. The spirit of life and youth is there--immortal and tender--yet
there too is the shadow of that pitiful "in vain," with which the
brevity of such beauty, arrested only in chilly marble, mocks us as
we pass!

It is life--but life at a distance--Life refined, winnowed, sifted,
purged. "Yet, O Prince, what labour! O Prince, what pain!" The
world is perhaps tired of hearing from the mouths of its great lonely
exiles the warning to youth "to sink unto its own soul," and let the
mad throngs clamour by, with their beckoning idols, and treacherous
pleading. But never has this unregarded hand been laid so gently
upon us as in the poem called "Self-Dependence."

Heaven forgive us--we cannot follow its high teaching--and yet we
too, we all, have felt that sort of thing, when standing at the prow of
a great ship we have watched the reflection of the stars in the
fast-divided water.

"Unaffrightened by the silence round them
Undistracted by the sights they see
These demand not that the world about them
Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.
But with joy the stars perform their shining
And the sea its long, moon-silvered roll;
For self-poised they live; nor pine with noting
All the fever of some differing soul."

The "one philosophy" is, as Matthew Arnold himself puts it,
"utrumque paratus," prepared for either event. Yet it leans, and how
should it not lean, in a world like this, to the sadder and the more
final. That vision of a godless universe, "rocking its obscure body to
and fro," in ghastly space, is a vision that refuses to pass away. "To
the children of chance," as my Catholic philosopher says, "chance
would seem intelligible."

But even if it be--if the whole confluent ocean of its experiences
be--unintelligible and without meaning; it remains that mortal men
must endure it, and comfort themselves with their "little pleasures."
The immoral cruelty of Fate has been well expressed by Matthew
Arnold in that poem called "Mycerinus," where the virtuous king
_does not_ receive his reward. He, for his part will revel and care
not. There may be nobler, there may be happier, ways of awaiting
the end--but whether "revelling" or "refraining," we are all waiting
the end. Waiting and listening, half-bitterly, half