bsurdity to be palpable.
Yet none the less they hold men. Why? I cannot tell. I only know
that they do not and cannot hold me; that I look like a stranger from
another world upon the business of this one; that I am among you, but
not of you; that your motives and aims to me are utterly
unintelligible; that you can give no account of them to which I can
attach any sense; that I have no clue to the enigma you seem so lightly
to solve by your religion, your philosophy, your science; that your
hopes are not mine, your ambitions not mine, your principles not mine;
that I am shipwrecked, and see around me none but are shipwrecked too;
yet, that these, as they cling to their spars, call them good ships and
true, speak bravely of the harbour to which they are prosperously
sailing, and even as they are engulfed, with their last breath, cry,
'lo, we are arrived, and our friends are waiting on the quay!' Who,
under these circumstances is mad? Is it I? Is it you? I can only
drift and wait. It may be that beyond these waters there is a harbour
and a shore. But I cannot steer for it, for I have no rudder, no
compass, no chart. You say you have. Go on, then, but do not call to
me. I must sink or swim alone. And the best for which I can hope is
speedily to be lost in the silent gulf of oblivion."

OFTEN as I had heard Audubon express these sentiments before, I had
never known him to reveal so freely and so passionately the innermost
bitterness of his soul. There was, no doubt, something in the
circumstances of the time and place that prompted him to this personal
note. For it was now the darkest and stillest hour of the night; and
we sat in the dim starlight, hardly seeing one another, so that it
seemed possible to say, as behind a veil, things that otherwise it
would have been natural to suppress. A long silence followed Audubon's
last words. They went home, I dare say to many of us more than we
should have cared to confess. And I felt some difficulty whom to
choose of the few who had not yet spoken, so as to avoid, as far as
possible, a tone that would jar upon our mood. Finally, I selected
Coryat, the poet, knowing he was incapable of a false note, and hoping
he might perhaps begin to pull us, as it were, up out of the pit into
which we had slipped. He responded from the darkness, with the
hesitation and incoherence which, in him, I have always found so
charming.

"I don't know," he began, "of course--well, yes