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Some there were whose sorrows drove them like Sarak in quest of the Waters of Oblivion, but, to all, those days were poppy days, unreal and meaningless; transitionary, as a bridge between unlike states.

Altogether, the house, like the time, was in a transitionary state, and represented faithfully enough the passage of the old middle age into the new life which had just burst into blossom throughout Europe, never, let us pray, to see its autumn or its winter.

She might have been trying to prepare him for a final rupture, and then 'Well, he concluded, with his customary good sense, 'no use meeting trouble halfway in five minutes I shall know for certain! At the same moment Mrs. Hylton and her daughter Flossie, a vivacious girl in the transitionary sixteen-year-old stage, were in the drawing-room at Linden Gardens.

A deathly stillness had all at once fallen like a blanket, blotting out McCarthy's violent speech. The rattling typewriter in the next room was abruptly stilled. The roar of the city died as a living creature is cut by the sword all at once, without the transitionary running down of most silences.

"Were I Diogenes," says wrathful Charles Lamb in one of his letters, "I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret." I fancy this loathing of the transitionary state came in great part from the rude and elemental nature of the means of moving in Lamb's day.

The so-called superstitious ages were not merely transitionary. Our regret that they have departed is to be explained not by a mere idealisation of the past, but by a conviction that truths have been lost, or at least have been submerged. Perhaps some day they may be recovered, and in some other form may again become our religion.

It was perhaps yet more important that I had enjoyed in my youth some knowledge of our Scots folk of the Highlands and the Islands. Not much beyond a century has passed since these were in the same convulsive and transitionary state as the Marquesans of to-day.

He was too human, easy, unclassical, and, on the other hand, too little touched with Byronic or revolutionary feeling, even to suggest the age of Pitt, Napoleon, Canning; he was too sensible, too orthodox, too firmly based on fact and on the past, to have any affinity with our own transitionary politics.

When will life return to this cathedral system? 'When was it ever a living system? answered the other. 'When was it ever anything but a transitionary makeshift since the dissolution of the monasteries? 'Why, then, not away with it at once? 'You English have not done with it yet. At all events, it is keeping your cathedrals rain-proof for you, till you can put them to some better use than now.