I am tired of tears and laughter, And men that laugh and weep; Of what may come hereafter For men that sow to reap: I am weary of days and hours, Blown buds of barren flowers, Desires and dreams and powers And everything but sleep. From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving, Whatever gods may be, That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. Heaven forbid that I should impute any melodious Swinburnian melancholy, or any other form of luxious self-pity, to millions of good fellows still fighting the good fight against circumstance. They would hoot at the notion. But in nearly all of them hope has, at some time or other, lost her first innocence. Time and place came when the spirit, although unbroken, went numb: the dull mind came to feel as if its business with ardour and choric spheres and quests of Holy Grails, and everything but rest, had been done quite a long while ago. Well chained to an oar in the galley, closely kept to a job in the mine, men caught a touch of the recklessness of the slave--if the world were so foul, let it go where it chose; they would snatch what they could, when they could; drink, and let the world go round. It is not sense to hope to reattain at will that deflowered virginity of faith. Others who have it may come in good time to be a majority of us all. Already three yearly "classes" of men who did not suffer that immense loss of experience which came with war service have come of age since the war; the new skin grows over the wounds. But we cannot write off as mere dream, with no after effects, the time when it was a kind of trench fashion to meet the demoded oaths of a friend with the dogma that "There _is_ no ---- God." CHAPTER V THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED I "Of late years," the novel of _Shirley_ begins, "an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England; they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good." This blessing, conferred on the West Riding a little before Waterloo, descended on our Western Front a little after the first battle of the Marne.