And yet hardly like them; not always so docile, nor so wholly prepared
for the departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour. Few
poets have fully recognised the metrical absence of their Muse. For full
recognition is expressed in one only way--silence.

It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America worship
the moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but no tribes are
known to adore the sun, and not the moon. For the periodicity of the sun
is still in part a secret; but that of the moon is modestly apparent,
perpetually influential. On her depend the tides; and she is Selene,
mother of Herse, bringer of the dews that recurrently irrigate lands
where rain is rare. More than any other companion of earth is she the
Measurer. Early Indo-Germanic languages knew her by that name. Her
metrical phases are the symbol of the order of recurrence. Constancy in
approach and in departure is the reason of her inconstancies. Juliet
will not receive a vow spoken in invocation of the moon; but Juliet did
not live to know that love itself has tidal times--lapses and ebbs which
are due to the metrical rule of the interior heart, but which the lover
vainly and unkindly attributes to some outward alteration in the beloved.
For man--except those elect already named--is hardly aware of
periodicity. The individual man either never learns it fully, or learns
it late. And he learns it so late, because it is a matter of cumulative
experience upon which cumulative evidence is lacking. It is in the after-
part of each life that the law is learnt so definitely as to do away with
the hope or fear of continuance. That young sorrow comes so near to
despair is a result of this young ignorance. So is the early hope of
great achievement. Life seems so long, and its capacity so great, to one
who knows nothing of all the intervals it needs must hold--intervals
between aspirations, between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses
of sleep. And life looks impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of