The Rhythm of Life and other Essays | Page 3

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This etext was prepared from the 1893 John Lane edition by David
Price, email [email protected]

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

Contents
The Rhythm of Life Decivilised A Remembrance The Sun The Flower
Unstable Equilibrium The Unit of the World By the Railway Side
Pocket Vocabularies Pathos The Point of Honour Composure Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes James Russell Lowell Domus Angusta
Rejection The Lesson of Landscape Mr. Coventry Patmore's Odes

Innocence and Experience Penultimate Caricature

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.

It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the IMITATION should both
have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and to
guess at the order of this periodicity. Both souls were in close touch
with the spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate human rules,
no infractions of the liberty and law of the universal movement, kept
from them the knowledge of recurrences. Eppur si muove. They knew
that presence does not exist without absence; they knew that what is
just upon its flight of farewell is already on its long path of return. They
knew that what is approaching to the very touch is hastening towards
departure. 'O wind,' cried Shelley, in autumn,
'O wind, If winter comes, can spring be far behind?'
They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interrupt with
unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of onset
and retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement. To live in constant
efforts after an equal life, whether the equality