Vanishing Roads and Other Essays | Page 6

to be
less busy with destruction than with renewed creation. She is but
wrecking the old, that
... there shall be Beautiful things made new, for the surprise Of the
sky-children.
As I have thus mused along with the reader, a reader I hope not too
imaginary, the manner in which the phrase with which I began has
recurred to my pen has been no mere accident, nor yet has it been a
mere literary device. It seemed to wait for one at every turn of one's
theme, inevitably presenting itself. For wherever in Nature we set our
foot, she seems to be endlessly the centre of vanishing roads, radiating
in every direction into space and time. Nature is forever arriving and
forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her
vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her
partings a promise of meetings farther along the road. She would seem
to say not so much Ave atque vale, as Vale atque ave. In all this
rhythmic drift of things, this perpetual flux of atoms flowing on and on
into Infinity, we feel less the sense of loss than of a musical progression
of which we too are notes.
We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the
vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the
vanishing roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of
beloved faces. But in this great company of vanishing things there is a

reassuring comradeship. We feel that we are units in a vast
ever-moving army, the vanguard of which is in Eternity. The road still
stretches ahead of us. For a little while yet we shall experience all the
zest and bustle of marching feet. The swift-running seasons, like
couriers bound for the front, shall still find us on the road, and shower
on us in passing their blossoms and their snows. For a while the
murmur of the running stream of Time shall be our
fellow-wayfarer--till, at last, up there against the sky-line, we too turn
and wave our hands, and know for ourselves where the road wends as it
goes to meet the stars. And others will stand as we today and watch us
reach the top of the ridge and disappear, and wonder how it seemed to
us to turn that radiant corner and vanish with the rest along the
vanishing road.

II
WOMAN AS A SUPERNATURAL BEING
The boy's first hushed enchantment, blent with a sort of religious awe,
as in his earliest love affair he awakens to the delicious mystery we call
woman, a being half fairy and half flower, made out of moonlight and
water lilies, of elfin music and thrilling fragrance, of divine whiteness
and softness and rustle as of dewy rose gardens, a being of unearthly
eyes and terribly sweet marvel of hair; such, too, through life, and
through the ages, however confused or overlaid by use and wont, is
man's perpetual attitude of astonishment before the apparition woman.
Though she may work at his side, the comrade of his sublunary
occupations, he never, deep down, thinks of her as quite real. Though
his wife, she remains an apparition, a being of another element, an
Undine. She is never quite credible, never quite loses that first nimbus
of the supernatural.
This is true not merely for poets; it is true for all men, though, of course,
all men may not be conscious of its truth, or realize the truth in just this
way. Poets, being endowed with exceptional sensitiveness of feeling

and expression, say the wonderful thing in the wonderful way, bring to
it words more nearly adequate than others can bring; but it is an error to
suppose that any beauty of expression can exaggerate, can indeed more
than suggest, the beauty of its truth. Woman is all that poets have said
of her, and all that poets can never say:
Always incredible hath seemed the rose, And inconceivable the
nightingale--
and the poet's adoration of her is but the articulate voice of man's love
since the beginning, a love which is as mysterious as she herself is a
mystery.
However some may try to analyse man's love for woman, to explain it,
or explain it away, belittle it, nay, even resent and befoul it, it remains
an unaccountable phenomenon, a "mystery we make darker with a
name." Biology, cynically pointing at certain of its processes, makes
the miracle rather more miraculous than otherwise. Musical
instruments are no explanation of music. "Is it not strange that sheep's
guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?" says Benedick, in Much
Ado About Nothing, commenting on Balthazar's music. But they do, for
all that, though no one considers sheep's gut the