f its multitudinous being: we know that the old love is gone. There
is a sweetness in song or in the cunning re-imaging of the beauty we
see; but the Magician of the Beautiful whispers to us of his art, how we
were with him when he laid the foundations of the world, and the song is
unfinished, the fingers grow listless. As we receive these intimations
of age our very sins become negative: we are still pleased if a voice
praises us, but we grow lethargic in enterprises where the spur to
activity is fame or the acclamation of men. At some point in the past we
may have struggled mightily for the sweet incense which men offer to a
towering personality; but the infinite is for ever within man: we sighed
for other worlds and found that to be saluted as victor by men did not
mean acceptance by the gods.

But the placing of an invisible finger upon our lips when we would
speak, the heart-throb of warning where we would love, that we grow
contemptuous of the prizes of life, does not mean that the spirit has
ceased from its labors, that the high-built beauty of the spheres is to
topple mistily into chaos, as a mighty temple in the desert sinks into
the sand, watched only by a few barbarians too feeble to renew its
ancient pomp and the ritual of its once shining congregations. Before
we, who were the bright children of the dawn, may return as the twilight
race into the silence, our purpose must be achieved, we have to assume
mastery over that nature which now overwhelms us, driving into the
Fire-fold the flocks of stars and wandering fires. Does it seem very
vast and far away? Do you sigh at the long, long time? Or does it appear
hopeless to you who perhaps return with trembling feet evening after
evening from a little labor? But it is behind all these things that
the renewal takes place, when love and grief are dead; when they loosen
their hold on the spirit and it sinks back into itself, looking out on
the pitiful plight of those who, like it, are the weary inheritors of so
great destinies: then a tenderness which is the most profound quality of
its being springs up like the outraying of the dawn, and if in that mood
it would plan or execute it knows no weariness, for it is nourished from
the First Fountain. As for these feeble children of the once glorious
spirits of the dawn, only a vast hope can arouse them from so vast a
despair, for the fire will not invigorate them for the repetition of
petty deeds but only for the eternal