: I do not expect common things from you. I expect
significant things. I would have you become creatively significant as
mothers and as writers and as men. The new civilisation awaits you--new
thought, the new life, superb opportunities for ushering in an heroic
age.

You are to attempt the impossible. Nothing of the temporal must hold you
long or master you. Immortality is not something to be won; it is here
and now in the priceless present hour, this moving point that ever
divides the past from the future. Practice daily to get out of the
three-score-and-ten delusion, into the eternal scope of things, wherein
the little troubles and the evils which so easily and continually beset,
are put away. There is no order in the temporal, no serenity, no
universality. You who are young can turn quickly. That which you suffer
you have earned. If you take your suffering apart and search it, you
will find the hidden beauty of it and the lesson. If you learn the
lesson, you will not have to suffer this way again. Every day there is a
lesson, every hour. The more you pass, the faster they come. One may
live a life of growth in a year. That which is stagnant is dying; that
which is static is dead.

There is no art in the temporal. You are not true workmen as slaves of
the time. Three-score-and-ten--that is but an evening camp in a vast
continental journey. Relate your seeming misfortunes not to the hour,
but to the greater distances, and the pangs of them are instantly gone.
Art--those who talk art in the temporal--have not begun to work. If they
only would look back at those masters whose work they follow, whose
lives they treasure, they would find that they revere men who lived
beyond mere manifestations in a name, and lifted themselves out of the
illusion of one life being all.

There is no philosophy in the temporal. That which we call reason and
science changes like the coats and ties of men. Material science talks
loud, its eyes empty, clutching at one restless comet and missing the
universe. That thing known as _psychology_ taught to-day in colleges
will become even for your generation a curio, sacred only for the
preservation of humour. No purpose that confines itself to matter can
become a constructive effect, for matter breaks down, is continually
changed into new forms.

Electric bulbs wear out and are changed, but the current does not
change. The current lights them one after another of different sizes, as
you put th