The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

								


Transcribed from the 1893 John Lane edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

Contents
The Rhythm of Life
Decivilised
A Remembrance
The Sun
The Flower
Unstable Equilibrium
The Unit of the World
By the Railway Side
Pocket Vocabularies
Pathos
The Point of Honour
Composure
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
James Russell Lowell
Domus Angusta
Rejection
The Lesson of Landscape
Mr. Coventry Patmore's Odes
Innocence and Experience
Penultimate Caricature

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.  Periodicity
rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the
orbit of his thoughts.  Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured,
velocities not ascertained, times not known.  Nevertheless, the
recurrence is sure.  What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it
does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.
Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the
mind.  Disease is metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periods
towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards
recovery.  Sorrow for one cause was intolerable yesterday, and will be
intolerable tomorrow; today it is easy to bear, but the cause has not
passed.  Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to
leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does not
remain--it returns.  Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise.  If we had made
a course of notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and
would have had an expectation instead of a discovery.  No one makes such
observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world, there
have never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles.  But
Thomas a Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not measure them.  In
his cell alone with the elements--'What wouldst thou more than these? for
out of these were all things made'--he learnt the stay to be found in the
depth of the hour of bitterness, and the remembrance that restrains the
soul at the coming of the moment of delight, giving it a more conscious
welcome, but presaging for it an inexorable flight.  And 'rarely, rarely
comest thou,' sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of
Delight.  Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to
our service--Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial
violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus
compelled.  That flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or
hyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows what trysts with Time.
It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the Imitation should both
have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and to guess
at the order of this periodicity.  Both souls were in close touch with
the spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate human rules, no