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To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very God, in all purity, tenderness, and truth, and absolute love, and then to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain." With a slight variation of expression this confession might have come direct from the lips of the most pronounced mystic.
At what date? one occasionally asks: for there are Royal Letters, dateless, but written in his hand, that raise such question in the utter dimness otherwise. Rather an emphatic intrusive kind of fellow, I should guess; wrote, he, not Friedrich, that ABRIDGMENT OF PLEURY'S ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, and other the like dreary Pieces, which used to be inflicted on mankind as Friedrich's.
Now, were any dateless writing to be found, in which, speaking of any past events, the writer should say, these things happened before there was any Congress in America, or before there was any Convention in France, it would be evidence that such writing could not have been written before, and could only be written after there was a Congress in America or a Convention in France, as the case might be; and, consequently, that it could not be written by any person who died before there was a Congress in the one country, or a Convention in the other.
The timely utterances of his contemporaries have passed away with the times that called them forth: his essays live perennially new. In the dateless realm of revelation, antiquity joins hands with futurity. There can be nothing either new or old in any utterance which is really true or beautiful or right.
Ripley and the Archon, and to the two Charleses, and believe me, as always, your friend, On the next page I write a little song, which you shall print if you think it worth the space. Nameless and dateless if you please.
So, when we turned our back at last on lovely Boscobel, itself shut out, as the common phrase goes, "from the world" by serried ramparts of maple, elm, acacia and catalpa, we knew well that that enceinte of leafage enclosed many little worlds of its own winged microcosms, epicycles of the grand cycle of dateless life which man in his humility assumes to be merely a subsidiary appendage of his own orbit.
"I'm not hot, thank you," said Isabel stiffly: but slowly, as if against her will, she opened the collar of her coat and pushed it back from her young neck and the crossed folds of her lace gown. The gown was very old, it had indeed belonged to Laura Selincourt: it was because Laura loved its soft, graceful, dateless lines that it had survived so long.
For the question was, as we shall see, raised anew by Madame de Stael, and the theory was finally to emerge that art and literature, like laws and institutions, are an expression of society and therefore inextricably linked with the other elements of social development a theory, it may be observed, which while it has discredited the habit of considering works of art in a vacuum, dateless and detached, as they were generally considered by critics of the seventeenth century, leaves the aesthetic problem much where it was.
A timely topic may, however, be used to embody a truly literary intention. In The Witching Hour, for example, journalism was lifted into literature by the sincerity of Mr. Thomas's conviction that he had something real and significant to say. The play became important because there was a man behind it. Individual personality is perhaps the most dateless of all phenomena.
Nowhere was this crude conception of the secrecy and magical virtue of the divine name more firmly held or more fully developed than in ancient Egypt, where the superstitions of a dateless past were embalmed in the hearts of the people hardly less effectually than the bodies of cats and crocodiles and the rest of the divine menagerie in their rock-cut tombs.
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