Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 223 pages of information about Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough.

Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 223 pages of information about Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough.

And so long as men can feel and think, the quest will go on.  We could not cease that quest if we would, and we would not if we could, for without it all the meaning would have gone out of life and we should be no more than the cattle in the fields.  Nor is the quest in vain.  We follow this trail and that, catch at this hint of a meaning and that gleam of vision, and though we find this path ends in a cul-de-sac, and that brings us back to the place from whence we started, we are learning all the time about the mysteries of our wilderness.  And one day, perhaps—­suddenly, it may be, as that vision of the great white mountains of the Oberland breaks upon the sight of the traveller—­we shall see whither the long adventure leads.  “Say not the struggle naught availeth,” said a poet who was not given to cultivating illusions.  And he went on:—­

    For while the tired waves, vainly breaking. 
      Seem here no painful inch to gain,
    Far back, through creeks and inlets making. 
      Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

But though I want to see a vision as much as anybody, I am out of touch with the company of the credulous.  I am with Doubting Thomas.  I have no capacity for believing the impossible, and have an entire distrust of dark rooms and magic.  People with bees in their bonnets leave me wondering, but cold.  I know a man—­a most excellent man—­whose life is a perfect debauch of visions and revelations.  He seems to discover the philosopher’s stone every other day.  Sometimes it is brown bread that is the way to salvation.  If you eat brown bread you will never die, or at any rate you will live until everybody is tired of you.  Sometimes it is a new tax or a new sort of bath that is the secret key to the whole contraption.  For one period he could talk of nothing but dried milk; for another, acetic acid was the thing.  Rub yourself with acetic acid and you would be as invulnerable to the ills of the body as Achilles was after he had been dipped by Thetis in the waters of Styx.  The stars tell him anything he wishes to believe, and he can conjure up spirits as easily as another man can order a cab.  It is not that he is a fool.  In practical affairs he is astonishingly astute.  It is that he has an illimitable capacity for belief.  He is always on the road to Damascus.

For my part I am content to wait.  I am for Wordsworth’s creed of “wise passiveness.”  I should as soon think of reading my destiny on the sole of my boot as in the palm of my hand.  The one would be just as illuminating as the other.  It would tell me what I chose to make it tell me.  That and no more.  And so with the stars.  People who pretend to read the riddle of our affairs in the pageant of the stars are deceiving themselves or are trying to deceive others.  They are giving their own little fancies the sanction of the universe.  The butterfly that I see flitting about in the sunshine outside might as well read the European war as a comment on its aimless little life.  The stars do not chatter about us, but they have a balm for us if we will be silent.  The “huge and thoughtful night” speaks a language simple, august, universal.

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Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.