She appeared to be confused and walked away from me, edging toward the lines of fences to avoid contact. I put my hand in my pocket to offer a coin, but she hurried on. There was nothing to do but let her go her way—a thing which seemed intensely cruel, though there was apparently nothing else to do. I have often thought of this one, dark, tense, dreary, and half wondered whether it was all a dream or whether I really saw it.
* * * * *
But the city for me, in my time, has been flecked with these shadows of disaster in the guise of decayed mortals who stared at me out of hollow eyes in the midst of the utmost gayety. You turn a corner laughing amid scenes of enthusiasm and activity, perhaps, and here comes despair along, hooded and hollow-eyed, accusing you of undue levity. You dine at your table, serene in your moderate prosperity, and in looks want, thin-lipped, and pale, asking how can you eat when she is as she is. You feel the health and vigor of your body, warmly clad, and lo, here comes illness or weakness, thin and pining, and with cough or sigh or halting step, cries: “See how I suffer—and you—you have health!” Weakness confronts strength, poverty wealth, health sickness, courage cowardice, fortune the very depths of misfortune, and they know each other not—or defy each other. Of a truth, they either despise or fear, the one the other.
THE BEAUTY OF LIFE
The beauty of life is involved very largely with the outline of its scenery. There are many other things which make up the joy of our world for us, but this is one of the most salient of its charms. The stretch of a level valley, the graceful rise of a hill, water running, a clump or a forest of trees—these add to the majesty of our being and show us how great a thing our world really is.
The significance of scenes in general which hold and bind our lives for us, making them sweet or grim according to the sharpness of our perceptions, is a wonderful thing. We are passing among them every moment. A new arrangement is had with every move we make. If we but lift our eyes we see a variation which is forever interesting and forever new.
The fact significant is that every scene possesses that vital instability which is the charm of existence. It is forever changing. The waters are running, the winds blowing, the light waxing and waning, and in the very ground such currents are at work as produce and modify all the visible life and color that we know. Great forces are at work, strong ones, and our own little lives are but a shadow of something that wills activity and enjoys it, that wills beauty and is beauty. The scenes that we see are purely representative of that.
The Beauty of Life