The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

								

infractions of the liberty and law of the universal movement, kept from
them the knowledge of recurrences.  Eppur si muove.  They knew that
presence does not exist without absence; they knew that what is just upon
its flight of farewell is already on its long path of return.  They knew
that what is approaching to the very touch is hastening towards
departure.  'O wind,' cried Shelley, in autumn,



   'O wind,

   If winter comes, can spring be far behind?'
They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interrupt with
unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of onset and
retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement.  To live in constant efforts
after an equal life, whether the equality be sought in mental production,
or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of the senses, is to live
without either rest or full activity.  The souls of certain of the
saints, being singularly simple and single, have been in the most
complete subjection to the law of periodicity.  Ecstasy and desolation
visited them by seasons.  They endured, during spaces of vacant time, the
interior loss of all for which they had sacrificed the world.  They
rejoiced in the uncovenanted beatitude of sweetness alighting in their
hearts.  Like them are the poets whom, three times or ten times in the
course of a long life, the Muse has approached, touched, and forsaken.
And yet hardly like them; not always so docile, nor so wholly prepared
for the departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour.  Few
poets have fully recognised the metrical absence of their Muse.  For full
recognition is expressed in one only way--silence.
It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America worship
the moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but no tribes are
known to adore the sun, and not the moon.  For the periodicity of the sun
is still in part a secret; but that of the moon is modestly apparent,
perpetually influential.  On her depend the tides; and she is Selene,
mother of Herse, bringer of the dews that recurrently irrigate lands
where rain is rare.  More than any other companion of earth is she the
Measurer.  Early Indo-Germanic languages knew her by that name.  Her
metrical phases are the symbol of the order of recurrence.  Constancy in
approach and in departure is the reason of her inconstancies.  Juliet
will not receive a vow spoken in invocation of the moon; but Juliet did
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 lacking.  It is in the after-