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We dream of one day coming to participate in a life or experience so good that there is no change from less good to more good possible within it, and which, if it can be said to progress at all, only, in Milton's magnificent words, 'progresses the dateless and irrevoluble circle of its own perfections, joining inseparable hands with joy and bliss in over-measure for ever'. Once this ideal has presented itself to our hopes or desires, it degrades by comparison with it to a second-best, the former ideal of endless development from lower to higher.
How much more striking would be the calendar counted on the rings of one of those awful trees which were standing when Christ was on earth, and where that brief mortal life is chronicled with the stolid apathy of vegetable being, which remembers all human history as a thing of yesterday in its own dateless existence! I have something more to say about elms.
There are forms of religious experience which are dateless processes of slow and unmarked growth, which may spread themselves over years; but there are also crises, when experience crystallizes into events so remarkable that they become standing dates in the lives of those who have enjoyed them, from which they reckon, as other people do from birth or marriage or the turning-points of their domestic and commercial history.
"What says the voice-its clear-lingering anguish? Just the watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety? Just a road-man, flinging to the moon his song? "No! Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping, Just his cry: 'How long?"
This makes their date one of incalculable antiquity; they are removed from us by a 'dark backward and abysm of time. The whole Age of Ice, the dateless period of the polishers of stone weapons, the arrival of men using weapons of bronze, the time which sufficed to change the climate and fauna and flora of Western Europe, lie between us and palaeolithic man.
"What says the voice-its clear-lingering anguish? Just the watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety? Just a road-man, flinging to the moon his song? "No! Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping, Just his cry: 'How long?"
I set out for camp the last of this week; may I expect letters from my friend? Be assured of my warmest friendship, and make me happy by the like assurance, as it will afford the sincerest pleasure to, Yours, with affection, Rariton, April 14th, 1780. I take the earliest opportunity of acknowledging the receipt of your dateless letter, and returning you my best thanks for it. Mr. and Mrs.
Morris's own; all the rest are of the dateless heritage of our race, fairy tales coming to us, now "softly breathed through the flutes of the Grecians," now told by Sagamen of Iceland. The whole performance is astonishingly equable; we move on a high tableland, where no tall peaks of Parnassus are to be climbed.
All the longings, passions, experiences, possibilities of womanhood animate that gliding shadow which has flitted through our consciousness, nameless, dateless, featureless, yet more profoundly real than the sharpest of portraits traced by a human hand. Here is the Fountain of the Ogre, at Berne.
Mother is gone dateless wi' sorrow, and I am but a young lass, i' years I mean; for I'm old enough wi' weeping. 'I'd ha' put up for t' farm mysel', sooner than had thee turned out, said Kester, in a low voice; then working himself up into a passion, as a new suspicion crossed his mind, he added, 'An' what for didn't yo' tell me on t' letter?
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