to some ferocious or jocular three-line comment. He may yearn
desperately to compose a really thrilling poem that will speak his
passionate soul; to churn up from the typewriter some lyric that will
rock with blue seas and frantic hearts; he finds himself allaying the
frenzy with some jovial sneer at Henry Ford or a yell about the High
Cost of Living. Poor soul, he is like one condemned to harangue the
vast, idiotic world through a keyhole, whence his anguish issues thin
and faint. Yet who will say that all his labour is wholly vain? Perhaps
some day the government will crown a Colyumist Laureate, some majestic
sage with ancient patient blue eyes and a snowy beard nobly stained with
nicotine, whose utterances will be heeded with shuddering respect. All
minor colyumists will wear robes and sandals; they will be an order of
scoffing friars; people will run to them on crowded streets to lay
before them the sorrows and absurdities of men. And in that day

The meanest paragraph that blows will give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for sneers.

MOVING

[Illustration]

Man, we suspect, is the only animal capable of persuading himself
that his hardships are medicine to the soul, of flattering
himself into a conviction that some mortal spasm was a fortifying
discipline.

Having just moved our household goods for the fourth time in four
years, we now find ourself in the singular state of trying to
believe that the horrors of the event have added to our supply of
spiritual resignation. Well, let us see.

The brutal task of taking one's home on trek is (we can argue) a
stirring tonic, a kind of private rehearsal of the Last Judgment,
when the sheep shall be divided from the shoats. What could be a
more convincing reminder of the instability of man's affairs than
the harrowing upheaval of our cherished properties? Those dark
angels, the moving men, how heartless they seem in their brisk
and resolute dispassion--yet how exactly they prefigure the
implacable sternness of the ultimate shepherds. A strange life is
theirs, taking them day after day into the bosom of homes
prostrated by the emigrating throe. Does this matter-of-fact
bearing conceal an infinite tenderness, a pity that dare not show
itself for fear of unmanly collapse? Are they secretly broken by
the sight of the desolate nursery, the dismantled crib, the
forgotten clockwork monkey lying in a corner of the cupboard
where the helpless Urchin laid