of elemental being we inhabit, they syllable in shadowy sound, out of old usage, the response, speaking of a love and a hope which we know have vanished from us for evermore.  So hour by hour the scourge of the infinite drives us out of every nook and corner of life we find pleasant.  And this always takes place when all is fashioned to our liking:  then into our dream strides the wielder of the lightning:  we get glimpse of the great beyond thronged with mighty, exultant, radiant beings:  our own deeds become infinitesimal to us:  the colours of our imagination, once so shining, grow pale as the living lights of God glow upon them.  We find a little honey in the heart which we make sweeter for some one, and then another lover, whose forms are legion, sighs to us out of its multitudinous being:  we know that the old love is gone.  There is a sweetness in song or in the cunning reimaging 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 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 labours, 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 labour?  But it is back of all these things that the renewal takes place, when love and grief are dead; when they loosen their hold on the spirit and its 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