imaginary, the manner in which the phrase with which I began has
recurred to my pen has been no mere accident, nor yet has it been a
mere literary device. It seemed to wait for one at every turn of one's
theme, inevitably presenting itself. For wherever in Nature we set our
foot, she seems to be endlessly the centre of vanishing roads, radiating
in every direction into space and time. Nature is forever arriving and
forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her
vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her
partings a promise of meetings farther along the road. She would seem to
say not so much _Ave atque vale_, as _Vale atque ave_. In all this
rhythmic drift of things, this perpetual flux of atoms flowing on and on
into Infinity, we feel less the sense of loss than of a musical
progression of which we too are notes.

We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the
vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing
roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces.
But in this great company of vanishing things there is a reassuring
comradeship. We feel that we are units in a vast ever-moving army, the
vanguard of which is in Eternity. The road still stretches ahead of us.
For a little while yet we shall experience all the zest and bustle of
marching feet. The swift-running seasons, like couriers bound for the
front, shall still find us on the road, and shower on us in passing
their blossoms and their snows. For a while the murmur of the running
stream of Time shall be our fellow-wayfarer--till, at last, up there
against the sky-line, we too turn and wave our hands, and know for
ourselves where the road wends as it goes to meet the stars. And others
will stand as we today and watch us reach the top of the ridge and
disappear, and wonder how it seemed to us to turn that radiant corner
and vanish with the rest along the vanishing road.