INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF STRIFE.


So, then, one chapter in my life had finished. Already, before the
completion of my sixth year, this first chapter had run its circle,
had rendered up its music to the final chord--might seem even, like
ripe fruit from a tree, to have detached itself forever from all the
rest of the arras that was shaping itself within my loom of life. No
Eden of lakes and forest lawns, such as the _mirage_ suddenly evokes
in Arabian sands,--no pageant of air-built battlements and towers,
that ever burned in dream-like silence amongst the vapors of summer
sunsets, mocking and repeating with celestial pencil "the fuming
vanities of earth,"--could leave behind it the mixed impression of so
much truth combined with so much absolute delusion. Truest of all
things it seemed by the excess of that happiness which it had sustained:
most fraudulent it seemed of all things, when looked back upon as some
mysterious parenthesis in the current of life, "self-withdrawn into
a wonderous depth," hurrying as if with headlong malice to extinction,
and alienated by _every_ feature from the new aspects of life that
seemed to await me. Were it not in the bitter corrosion of heart that
I was called upon to face, I should have carried over to the present
no connecting link whatever from the past. Mere reality in this
fretting it was, and the undeniableness of its too potent remembrances,
that forbade me to regard this burned-out inaugural chapter of my life
as no chapter at all, but a pure exhalation of dreams. Misery is a
guaranty of truth too substantial to be refused; else, by its
determinate evanescence, the total experience would have worn the
character of a fantastic illusion.