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Updated: May 3, 2025
I could only say I would do myself the pleasure; and then he still waited a moment to say that his brother Arthur could not recover from his dismay at his greeting to Miss Torwood. "But," he said, "the boy's head was quite turned by the beauty of the country. He had been raving all day about the new poet, Alfred Tennyson, and I believe he thought he had walked into lotus-land."
Everything else sank into insignificance beside the one supreme necessity of catching that steamer. There would not be another sailing for the Orient for ten days. The prospect of ten days in this lotus-land alone with a perilously pretty girl who had evidently taken an enormous fancy to him filled him with alarm.
How wonderful, then, that in such a charmed lotus-land we should meet with the mysterious unrest of soul, and the fixed onward look of the Sibyl to times widely different from her own.
So I went idly on for a fortnight, in a sort of lazy lotus-land, never thinking of the future, but as happy and as much at home as if I'd lived all my life with Jack and Elsie. I hated even to think I would soon be well; for then I'd have to go and look out for Courtenay Ivor.
They have been no more than the sighs of men gazing at what other men had left behind them; faint, impossible appeals to the god of retrogression, uttered for their own sake and ritual, rather than with any intent that they should be heard. Oxford, that lotus-land, saps the will-power, the power of action.
The great Mother chants her "Song of Songs" throughout the myriad changes of Time, in terms so similar to the imagery of the Divine Epithalamium that, from a human standpoint, it seems swept by the spice-laden breezes of the Malayan Lotus-land, rather than by the fainter fragrance wafted from the orchards and gardens of Palestine or Egypt.
Every now and then the sea calls some farmer or shepherd, and the restless drop in his veins gives him no peace till he has found his way over the hills and fells to the port of Whitehaven, and gone back to the cradling bosom that rocked his ancestors. But in the main, this lovely spot was a northern Lotus-land to the Viking. The great hills shut him in from the sight of the sea.
The 'ruinous winds' drove Odysseus and his ships for ten days, and on the tenth they touched the land of the Lotus- Eaters, whose flowery food causes sweet forgetfulness. Lotus-land was possibly in Western Libya, but it is more probable that ten days' voyage from the southern point of Greece, brought Odysseus into an unexplored region of fairy-land.
Egypt, of which Homer had some knowledge, was but five days' sail from Crete. Lotus-land, therefore, being ten days' sail from Malea, was well over the limit of the discovered world. From this country Odysseus went on till he reached the land of the lawless Cyclopes, a pastoral people of giants. Later Greece feigned that the Cyclopes dwelt near Mount Etna, in Sicily.
Thus may the appetite for pleasure, the ability really to savour it, be restored and incidentally kept in good trim for full use when old age arrives and he enters the lotus-land. And with it all, when the hour of enjoyment comes, he must insist on his mind being free; expelling every preoccupation, nonchalantly accepting risks like a youth, he must abandon himself to the hour.
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