THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules
over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his
thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not
ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What
the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will
suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events;
it depends upon the tides of the mind. Disease is metrical, closing in at
shorter and shorter periods towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and
longer intervals towards recovery. Sorrow for one cause was intolerable
yesterday, and will be intolerable tomorrow; today it is easy to bear, but
the cause has not passed. Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved
is bound to leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does
not remain--it returns. Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise. If we had made
a course of notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and would
have had an expectation instead of a discovery. No one makes such
observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world, there have
never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles. But
Thomas e Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not measure them.
In his cell alone with the elements--\'What wouldst thou more than these?
for out of these were all things made\'--he learnt the stay to be found in the
depth of the hour of bitterness, and the remembrance that restrains the soul
at the coming of the moment of delight, giving it a more conscious
welcome, but presaging for it an inexorable flight. And \'rarely, rarely
comest thou,\' sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of
Delight. Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to
our service--Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial violence
throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus compelled.
THAT flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or hyperbolically
curved, keeping no man knows what trysts with Time.