not stay here till I
die, seeing that lake always. I couldn't bear it. I am going. It matters
little to me whether life is to be found at home or abroad, in adventure
or in habits and customs. One thing matters--do I stay or go?'

He turned into the woods and walked aimlessly, trying to escape from his
thoughts, and to do so he admired the pattern of the leaves, the flight
of the birds, and he stopped by the old stones that may have been Druid
altars; and he came back an hour after, walking slowly through the
hazel-stems, thinking that the law of change is the law of life. At that
moment the cormorants were coming down the glittering lake to their
roost. With a flutter of wings they perched on the old castle, and his
mind continued to formulate arguments, and the last always seemed the
best.

At half-past seven he was thinking that life is gained by escaping from
the past rather than by trying to retain it; he had begun to feel more
and more sure that tradition is but dead flesh which we must cut off if
we would live.... But just at this spot, an hour ago, he had acquiesced
in the belief that if a priest continued to administer the Sacraments
faith would return to him; and no doubt the Sacraments would bring about
some sort of religious stupor, but not that sensible, passionate faith
which he had once possessed, and which did not meet with the approval of
his superiors at Maynooth. He had said that in flying from the monotony
of tradition he would find only another monotony, and a worse one--that
of adventure; and no doubt the journalist's life is made up of fugitive
interests. But every man has, or should have, an intimate life as well
as an external life; and in losing interest in religion he had lost the
intimate life which the priesthood had once given him. The Mass was a
mere Latin formula, and the vestments and the chalice, the Host itself,
a sort of fetishism--that is to say, a symbolism from which life had
departed, shells retaining hardly a murmur of the ancient ecstasy. It
was therefore his fate to go in quest of--what? Not of adventure. He
liked better to think that his quest was the personal life--that
intimate exaltation that comes to him who has striven to be himself, and
nothing but himself. The life he was going to might lead him even to a
new faith. Religious forms arise and die. The Catholic Church had come
to the end of its thread; the spool seemed pretty well empty, and he sat
down so that he might