To his former foolish fancy a primrose might preach a
childlike trust; the untoiling lilies might from their field cast seeds
of a higher growth into his troubled heart; now they are no better than
the colour the painter leaves behind him on the doorpost of his
workshop, when, the day's labour over, he wipes his brush on it ere he
depart for the night. The look in the eyes of his dog, happy in that he
is short-lived, is one of infinite sadness. All graciousness must
henceforth be a sorrow: it has to go with the sunsets. That a thing must
cease takes from it the joy of even an aeonian endurance--for its _kind_
is mortal; it belongs to the nature of things that cannot live. The
sorrow is not so much that it shall perish as that it could not
live--that it is not in its nature a real, that is, an eternal thing.
His children are shadows--their life a dance, a sickness, a corruption.
The very element of unselfishness, which, however feeble and beclouded
it may be, yet exists in all love, in giving life its only dignity adds
to its sorrow. Nowhere at the root of things is love--it is only a
something that came after, some sort of fungous excrescence in the
hearts of men grown helplessly superior to their origin.
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