The Silent Isle by Arthur Christopher Benson
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page 7 of 308 (02%)
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into some delicate economy of sweet melody and gliding chord. It has
its shadows, I do not doubt, this Silent Isle; but to-day at least it is all still and translucent as its clear-moving quiet waters, free as its vaulted sky, rich as its endless plain. It is not that I mean to be idle here! I have my web to weave; I have my lucid mirror. But instead of scrambling and peeping, I mean to see it all clearly and tranquilly, without dust and noise. I have lived laboriously and hastily for twenty years; and surely there is a time for garnering the harvest and for reckoning up the store? I want to see behind it all, into the meaning of it all, if I can. Surely when we are bidden to consider the lilies of the field, and told that they neither toil nor spin, it is not that we may turn aside from them in scorn, and choose rather to grow rank and strong, bulging like swedes, shoulder by shoulder, in the gross furrow. It is not as though we content ourselves with the necessary work of the world; we multiply vain activities, we turn the songs of poets and the words of the wise into dumb-bells to toughen our intellectual muscles; we make our pastimes into envious rivalries and furious emulations; and when we have poured out our contempt upon a few quiet-minded dreamers for their lack of spirit, scarified a few lovers of leisure for their absence of ability, ploughed up a few pretty wastes where the field-flowers grew as they would, bred up a few hundred gay golden birds, that we may gloat over the thought of striking them blood-bedabbled out of the sky on a winter afternoon, we think complacently of the Kingdom of God, and all we have done so diligently to hasten its coming. There is a pleasant story of a man who was asked by an ardent missionary for a subscription to some enterprise or other in the ends of the earth. The man produced a shilling and a sovereign. "Here is a |
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