ever!

Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,
And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail, as I am failing,
Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!"

This we call poetry; and we call the Iliad poetry. But the likeness is
superficial, and the difference profound. Was it Homer or Shelley that
grasped Reality? This is not a question of literary excellence; it is a
question of the sense of life. And--oddly enough--it is a question to
which the intellect has no answer. The life in each of us takes hold of
it and answers it empirically. The normal man is Homeric, though he is
not aware of the fact. Especially is the American Homeric; naif,
spontaneous, at home with fact, implicitly denying the Beyond. Is he
right? This whole continent, the prairies, the mountains and the coast,
the trams and trolleys, the sky-scrapers, the factories, elevators,
automobiles, shout to that question one long deafening Yes. But there is
another country that speaks a different tongue. Before America was,
India is.

VII

THE RELIGION OF BUSINESS

In the house in which I am staying hangs an old coloured print,
representing two couples, one young and lusty, the other decrepit, the
woman carrying an hour-glass, the man leaning on a stick; and
underneath, the following inscription:

"My father and mother that go so stuping to your grave,
Pray tell me what good I may in this world expect to have?"

"My son, the good you can expect is all forlorn,
Men doe not gather grapes from of a thorn."

This dialogue, I sometimes think, symbolises the attitude of the new
world to the old, and the old to the new. Not seldom I feel among
Americans as the Egyptian is said to have felt among the Greeks, that I
am moving in a world of precocious and inexperienced children, bearing
on my own shoulders the weight of the centuries. Yet it is not exactly
that Americans strike one as young in spirit; rather they strike one as
undeveloped. It is as though they had never faced life and asked
themselves what it is; as though they were so occupied in running that
it has never occurred to them to inquire where they started and whither
they are going. They seem to be always doing and never experiencing. A
dimension of life, one would say, is lacking, and they live in a plane
instead of in a solid. That missing dimension I shall call religion. Not
that