not live to know that love itself has tidal
times--lapses and ebbs which are due to the metrical rule of the interior
heart, but which the lover vainly and unkindly attributes to some outward
alteration in the beloved. For man--except those elect already named--is
hardly aware of periodicity. The individual man either never learns it
fully, or learns it late. And he learns it so late, because it is a
matter of cumulative experience upon which cumulative evidence is long
lacking. It is in the after-part of each life that the law is learnt so
definitely as to do away with the hope or fear of continuance. That
young sorrow comes so near to despair is a result of this young
ignorance. So is the early hope of great achievement. Life seems so
long, and its capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of all the
intervals it needs must hold--intervals between aspirations, between
actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep. And life looks
impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of the inevitable and
unfailing refreshment. It would be for their peace to learn that there
is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more subtle--if it is not too
audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare--than the phrase was meant to
contain. Their joy is flying away from them on its way home; their life
will wax and wane; and if they would be wise, they must wake and rest in
its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the law that commands all
things--a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity.

DOMUS ANGUSTA

The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large human
destiny, charged with a fate too great, a history too various, for its
slight capacities. Men have commonly complained of fate; but their
complaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness, of the human
lot. A disproportion--all in favour of man--between man and his destiny
is one of the things to be taken for granted in literature: so frequent
and so easy is the utterance of the habitual lamentation as to the
trouble of a "vain capacity," so well explained has it ever been.

Thou hast not half the power to do me harm
That I have to be hurt,

discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the brave
Emilia. But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow house.
Obviously it never had its poet. Little elocution is there, little
argument or definition, little explicitness. And yet for every v