It came to me for a moment to-day in my little orchard deep in
high-seeded grass: a breeze came and went, stirring the leaves of the
trees and bowing the tall grasses with its flying footsteps; a bird
broke out in a bush into a jocund trill of song, as if triumphing in
the joyful sight of something that was hidden from my eyes. If I could
but have caught and held the secret, how easily it would have solved my
own perplexities, how faithfully would I have whispered it in men's
ears; but while I wondered, it was gone like the viewless passage of an
angel, and left me with my longing unfulfilled, my yearning
unsatisfied.
XIII
I have been spending some days in town, on business; I have been
sitting on two committees, I have given a lecture, I have attended a
public dinner; and now I have come back gratefully to my hermitage. I
got home in the evening; it is winter, but unusually warm; and the
birds were fluting in the bushes, as I walked round the garden in the
twilight, as though they had an inkling of the Spring; to hear them
gave me a sort of delicious pain, I hardly know why. They seemed to
speak to me of old happy hours that have long folded their wings, of
bright pleasant days, lightly regarded, easily spent, shut into the
volumes of the past. "I see," as the Psalmist said, "that all things
come to an end." There is something artificial about the soft sadness
that one feels, and yet it is perfectly natural and instinctive; it is
not as if I were melancholy or unhappy; my life is full of active
enjoyment, and I am in that mood of delightful tranquillity which comes
of having finished a tiresome series of engagements which I had
anticipated without pleasure.
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