divine this beneath the simple everyday words of the narrative. Here is
an artist and a poet; he had chosen his life, he had planned it, by no
means as a life of action. His whole culture, his whole self-discipline,
had been directed to the further refining of a keen natural sensibility.
Necessarily and intentionally he had turned towards solitude and
contemplation. He had known himself to be purely a mirror for the world,
tarnishable under the breath of the crowd. But now it was for him to
lead a life opposed to his former law, contrary to his plan; and this
not of necessity but by a completely voluntary act. That _ego_ he had so
jealously sheltered, in face of the world yet out of the world, he was
now to yield up, to cast without hesitation or regret into the thick of
human wars; he was no longer to spend his days apart from the jostling
and the shouldering and the breath of troops; he was to bear his part in
the mechanism that serves the terrible ends of war. And the close of a
life which he would have pronounced, from his former point of view, to
be slavery--the close might be speedy death. He had to bring himself to
look upon his old life--the life that was lighted by his visions and
his hopes, the life that fulfilled his sense of universal existence--as
a mere dream, perhaps never to be dreamed again.

That is what he calls 'adapting himself.' And how the word recurs in his
letters! It is a word that teaches him where duty lies, a duty of which
the difficulty is to be gauged by the difference of the present from the
past, of the bygone hope from the present effort. 'In the fulness of
productiveness,' he confesses, 'at the hour when life is flowering, a
young creature is snatched away, and cast upon a barren soil where all
he has cherished fails him. Well, after the first wrench he finds that
life has not forsaken him, and sets to work upon the new ungrateful
ground. The effort calls for such a concentration of energy as leaves no
time for either hopes or fears. And I manage it, except only in moments