and always man is emotional. To speak
loosely, the dimensions of the human cosmos are feeling, emotion, and
sensation.
Build your fine structures. We like to see the foundations laid well and
the thick walls go up. Keep to your wizard inventions. We like to live
in a magic world. And ah, the indomitable machines with their austere
promise of free days for weary hands, and ah, the locomotives and the
ships steaming their ways toward intercourse, toward comity, toward
fellowship! We like the intricacy and the vastness of the world in which
we live. But "an unconsidered life is not fit to be lived by any man,"
says Aristotle. We must consider the phenomenon, civilisation, searching
down for the nucleus of its worth. We will find that the stone
structure without hope were a pitiable thing, that the making of
compacts and the banking of capital, without hope, were pitiable. This
hope that is the life germane, the immortal flash of mortality, the most
keenly human point in all humanity, is the hope for greater and greater
social happiness. Our world is an ever unfinished house which we are
employed in building. If we are imbued with the spirit of the architect
and not of the hod-carrier, we will hope sweetly for the work. The house
beautiful will begin to mean our life, and each night we will consult
our drawings, looking to it that on the house built of our days the sun
shall wester, and that within shall be intimacy, and laughter, great
speech and close love, looking to it that the home be such as to better
to-day's tenant so that he be more loving and lovable than the one of
yesterday.
We are wrong, perhaps. Long ago we were no less than now. When we
reached a hand in the darkness and grasped that of our fellow, the love
and the strongly frail human abandon were no less. We have not grown in
heart's munificence, perhaps. It is one of the illusions only. But the
hope is ours. For what do you hope?
DANE.
XXVII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON.
July 22, 19--.
Your birthday, Herbert, and for greeting I state that I walk your length
with you. A truce to quarrelling! It is now a year since you informed me
you were going to be married, and since then the gods have thundered
their laughter at the sight of two muttering men who sat themselves on
the axes of earth to dangle their legs into orbit vastness. Chronic
somnambulists that they are, they took their monopolist way thither in
their sleep.
I canno
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