'Mitigations?' I gasped, feeling for a moment a little giddy. But it didn't matter: always when we meet Lady Hyslop and I have the most wonderful conversations. WAXWORKS 'But one really never knows the Age one lives in. How interesting it would be,' I said to the lady next me, 'how I wish we could see ourselves as Posterity will see us!' I have said it before, but on this occasion I was struck--almost thunder-struck--by my own remark. Like a rash enchanter, the spirit I had raised myself alarmed me. For a queer second I did see ourselves in that inevitable mirror, but cadaverous and out-of-date and palsied--a dusty set of old waxworks, simpering inanely in the lumber-room of Time. 'Better to be forgotten at once!' I exclaimed, with an emphasis that seemed to surprise the lady next me. ADJECTIVES But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, and the negro and star-enamelled Night? WHERE? I, who move and breathe and place one foot before the other, who watch the Moon wax and wane, and put off answering my letters, where shall I find the Bliss which dreams and blackbirds' voices promise, of which the waves whisper, and hand-organs in streets near Paddington faintly sing? Does it dwell in some island of the South Seas, or far oasis among deserts and gaunt mountains; or only in those immortal gardens imagined by Chinese poets beyond the great cold palaces of the Moon? IN THE STREET These eye-encounters in the street, little touches of love-liking; faces that ask, as they pass, 'Are you my new lover?' Shall I one day--in Park Lane or Oxford Street perhaps--see the unknown Face I dread and look for? THE ABBEY AT NIGHT And as at night I went past the Abbey, saw its walls towering high and solemn among the autumn stars, I pictured to myself the white population in the vast darkness of its interior--all that hushed people of Heroes--; not dead, I would think them, but animated with a still kind of life; and at last, after all their intolerable toils, the sounding tumult of battle, and perilous seapaths, resting there, tranquil and satisfied and glorious, amid the epitaphs and allegorical figures of their tombs--those high-piled, trophied, shapeless Abbey tombs, that long ago they toiled for, and laid down their gallant lives to win. DESPERANCE