The grass
can never be as green again to eyes grown watery. The lambs
that skipped when we did were long since served as mutton.
And if
Die Fusse tragen mich so muthig nicht empor
Die hohen Stufen die ich kindisch ubersprang,
why, I will take the fact for granted. My youth is fled, my
friends are dead. The daisies and the snows whiten by turns
the grave of him or her - the dearest I have loved. Shall I
make a pilgrimage to that sepulchre? Drop futile tears upon
it? Will they warm what is no more? I for one have not the
heart for that. Happily life has something else for us to
do. Happily 'tis best to do it.
CHAPTER IV
THE passage from the romantic to the realistic, from the
chimerical to the actual, from the child's poetic
interpretation of life to life's practical version of itself,
is too gradual to be noticed while the process is going on.
It is only in the retrospect we see the change. There is
still, for yet another stage, the same and even greater
receptivity, - delight in new experiences, in gratified
curiosity, in sensuous enjoyment, in the exercise of growing
faculties. But the belief in the impossible and the bliss of
ignorance are seen, when looking back, to have assumed almost
abruptly a cruder state of maturer dulness.
