of the field
nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and
know no music but the roar of the furnace:--when the old sweet silence
of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the
old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedgerow bough, and
the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cushat,
and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead, and
remembered of no man:--then the world, like the Eastern king, will
perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened
hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere:--gold that
the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them,
but mocks them horribly:--gold for which their fathers sold peace and
health, and holiness and liberty:--gold that is one vast grave."

* * *

The earth is crowded full with clay gods and false prophets, and fresh
legions for ever arriving to carry on the old strife for supremacy; and
if a man pass unknown all the time that his voice is audible, and his
hand visible, through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will dream
in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave shall have closed
on him and shut him for ever from sight.

When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to treasure its
recollections; even to pause and look back, and to see what flower of a
fair thought, what fruit of a noble art it might have overlooked or left
down-trodden.

But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind and heavy of foot;
it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest, and can find none;
nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot
count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated
under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow to be
moved, and swift--terribly swift--to forget.

Why should it not be?

It has known the best, it has known the worst, that ever can befall it.

And the prayer that to the heart of a man seems so freshly born from his
own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same old
old cry which it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound of
the wind, and for ever--for ever--unanswered?

* * *

There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken
brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its
reason, the sunrise of