The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

								

every character.  There was no tyranny in such a method.  His idleness
justified itself by the liberality it permitted to his taste.  Never
having made his love of letters further a secondary purpose, never having
bound the literary genius--that delicate Ariel--to any kind of servitude,
never having so much as permitted himself a prejudice whereby some of his
delights should be stinted while others were indulged beyond the
sanctions of modest reason, he barely tolerated his own preferences,
which lay somewhat on the hither side of full effectiveness of style.
These the range of his reading confessed by certain exclusions.
Nevertheless it was not of deficiencies that he was patient: he did but
respect the power of pause, and he disliked violence chiefly because
violence is apt to confess its own limits.  Perhaps, indeed, his own fine
negatives made him only the more sensible of any lack of those literary
qualities that are bound in their full complement to hold themselves at
the disposal of the consummate author--to stand and wait, if they may do
no more.
Men said that he led a dilettante life.  They reproached him with the
selflessness that made him somewhat languid.  Others, they seemed to
aver, were amateurs at this art or that; he was an amateur at living.  So
it was, in the sense that he never grasped at happiness, and that many of
the things he had held slipped from his disinterested hands.  So it was,
too, in this unintended sense; he loved life.  How should he not have
loved a life that his living made honourable?  How should he not have
loved all arts, in which his choice was delicate, liberal, instructed,
studious, docile, austere?  An amateur man he might have been called,
too, because he was not discomposed by his own experiences, or shaken by
the discovery which life brings to us-that the negative quality of which
Buddhism seems to accuse all good is partaken by our happiness.  He had
always prayed temperate prayers and harboured probable wishes.  His
sensibility was extreme, but his thought was generalised.  When he had
joy he tempered it not in the common way by meditation upon the general
sorrow but by a recollection of the general pleasure.  It was his finest
distinction to desire no differences, no remembrance, but loss among the
innumerable forgotten.  And when he suffered, it was with so quick a
nerve and yet so wide an apprehension that the race seemed to suffer in
him.  He pitied not himself so tenderly as mankind, of whose capacity for
pain he was then feelingly persuaded.  His darkening eyes said in the
extreme hour: 'I have compassion on the multitude.'

THE SUN

Nowhere else does the greater light so rule the day, so measure, so
divide, so reign, make so imperial laws, so visibly kindle, so
immediately quicken, so suddenly efface, so banish, so restore, as in a
plain like this of Suffolk with its enormous sky.  The curious have an