It, too, is full of images of the "earth of the liquid and slumbering
trees," the "earth of departed sunset," the "earth of the vitreous pour
of the full moon just tinged with blue." It is full of material
loveliness, plies itself to innumerable dainty shells--to the somnolence
of the Southern night, to the hieratic gesture of temple dancers, to the
fall of lamplight into the dark, to the fantastic gush of fireworks, to
the romance of old mirrors and faded brocades and Saxony clocks, to the
green young panoply of spring. And just as it gives again the age's
consciousness of the delicious robe of earth, so, too, it gives again
its sense of weariness and powerlessness and oppression. The nineteenth
century had been loud with blare and rumors and the vibration of
colossal movements, and man had apparently traversed vast distances and
explored titanic heights and abysmal depths. And yet, for all the glare,
the earth was darker. The light was miasmic only. The life of man seemed
as ever a brief and sad and simple thing, the stretching of impotent
hands, unable to grasp and hold; the interlacing of shadows; the
unclosing, a moment before nightfall, of exquisite and fragile blossoms.
The sense of the infirmity of life, the consciousness that it had no
more than the signification of a dream with passing lights, or halting
steps in the snow, or an old half-forgotten story, had mixed a deep
wistfulness and melancholy into the very glamour of the globe, and
become heavier itself for all the sweetness of earth.
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