More ballad-
concerts, more quaint English, more robustious barytone songs, more
piecemeal pictures, more anxious decoration, more colonial poetry, more
young nations with withered traditions. Yet it is before this prospect
that the provincial overseas lifts up his voice in a boast or a promise
common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable only in senility.
He promises the world a literature, an art, that shall be new because his
forest is untracked and his town just built. But what the newness is to
be he cannot tell. Certain words were dreadful once in the mouth of
desperate old age. Dreadful and pitiable as the threat of an impotent
king, what shall we name them when they are the promise of an impotent
people? 'I will do such things: what they are yet I know not.'
A REMEMBRANCE
When the memories of two or three persons now upon earth shall be rolled
up and sealed with their records within them, there will be no
remembrance left open, except this, of a man whose silence seems better
worth interpreting than the speech of many another. Of himself he has
left no vestiges. It was a common reproach against him that he never
acknowledged the obligation to any kind of restlessness. The kingdom of
heaven suffereth violence, but as he did none there was nothing for it
but that the kingdom of heaven should yield to his leisure.
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