him by heart. And, if I mistake not, he will come to his own
again in the near future, when there will be no talk of Carlylean
echoes.

All alone, sharing its page with no other thought, is this, to me,
characteristic phrase: "_Mental Parabolism_, _N. B._" It was like a
shock to see it once more after all these years, and I have been
trying to understand it. It was born, I think, of my frenzy for
analogizing. I wanted some analogy, in physical phenomena, for
everything in my mental experience. Professor Drummond was to be left
infinitely in the rear. And by parabolism, it seems according to a
later note, I meant that a man's intellectual career is a curve, and
that curve is a parabola, being the resultant of his mental mass into
his intellectual force. The importance of this notion impresses me
more now than then. It will explain how men of indubitable genius stop
at certain points along the road. They can get no further, because
their mental parabola is complete. All that has happened since is to
them unreal and unimportant. One man I know exemplifies this to a
remarkable degree. His parabola starts at the seventeenth century,
rises to its maximum somewhere about the Johnsonian period, continues
with scarcely abated vigour as far as Thackeray and Carlyle, declines
towards Trollope and--ends. To speak of Meredith and Tolstoi, Ibsen
and Maeterlinck, is to beat the air. The energy is exhausted, the mind
has completed its curve; the rest is a quiet reminiscence of what has
been.

It pleases me to think that there may be some grain of truth in all
this, though I am not unmindful of the inevitable conclusion, that my
own parabola will some day take its downward course, and I shall sit,
quiescent, while the younger men around will demand stormily why I
cannot see the grandeur, the profundity, of their newer gods. There
lies the tragedy. Those gods, quite possibly, _will_ be greater than
mine--_must_ be, if my belief in man be worth anything. Yes, that is
the tragedy. I shall be at rest, and the youths of the golden future
will be seeing visions and dreaming dreams of which I have not even
the faintest hint.

I feel this most keenly, when reading Nietzsche, that volcanic
stammerer of the thing to come. I feel, "inside," as children say,
that my parabola will be finished before I can win to the burning
heart of the man. It frightens me (a sign of coming fatigue) to launch
out on one of his torrents of thought--veritable ru