retrospection, less to have marched toward any goal than always to
have jumped and scrambled from one stepping-stone to another because,
however momentarily, "just this or that poor impulse seemed the sole
work of a lifetime."

Well! at least I have known these moments and the rapture of their
dominance; and I am not lightly to be stripped of recollection of
them, nor of the attendant thrill either, by any cheerless hour
wherein, as sometimes happens, my personal achievements confront me
like a pile of flimsy jack-straws.

What does it all amount to?--I do not know. There may be some sort of
supernal bookkeeping, somewhere, but very certainly it is not
conformable to any human mathematics.






_THE CORDS OF VANITY

"His has been the summer air, and the sunshine, and the flowers; and
gentle ears have listened to him, and gentle eyes have been upon him.
Let others eat his honey that please, so that he has had his morsel
and his song."_