unfailing refreshment. It would be for their peace to learn that there
is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more subtle--if it is not too
audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare--than the phrase was meant to
contain. Their joy is flying away from them on its way home; their life
will wax and wane; and if they would be wise, they must wake and rest in
its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the law that commands all
things--a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity.




DOMUS ANGUSTA


The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large human
destiny, charged with a fate too great, a history too various, for its
slight capacities. Men have commonly complained of fate; but their
complaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness, of the human
lot. A disproportion--all in favour of man--between man and his destiny
is one of the things to be taken for granted in literature: so frequent
and so easy is the utterance of the habitual lamentation as to the
trouble of a "vain capacity," so well explained has it ever been.

Thou hast not half the power to do me harm
That I have to be hurt,

discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the brave
Emilia. But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow house.
Obviously it never had its poet. Little elocution is there, little
argument or definition, little explicitness. And yet for every vain