Yet the chelonian-footed progress of science here, as usual, has in the outcome managed to catch up with the forerunning hare-brained fancies of the poets. Astronomers are now agreed that we inhabit a world already dying, a world made tenable for parasites through the abating of its vital heat; and that our race infests earth only during the last stages of the globe's demise. We men and women in our worldly relations rank, if you be an optimist, with lice: if pessimism be your creed, you will lean to the old poetic idea of our being maggots. For the science of the astronomer does, in essentials, but revert to the most ancient notions of cosmology; finds nowhere apparent anything save the operation and products of death; and rather cheerlessly unveils the cold and murderous tides of circumambient æther, about which drift so many other moribund planets among the corpses of their fellows. None the less, it is with this omnipresent and omnicorporeal monarch that the artist makes sport, depriving death of terrors with the opiates of religion; and maiming death of potency likewise, so long as the artist eludes destruction and survives in his art. To that attenuated, grotesque and defamatory survival I shall by and by come back: meanwhile I must protest, even here, that in this third struggle is no least beckoning chance of victory. For, before common-sense or piety man figures, as I have said, in the rôle of Frankenstein; he is as Dom Manuel before the vivified image of Sesphra; and he combats, without much hope, his own terrible creation: but here, the opponent seems far more likely to have created him, however accidentally. By the fanciful may mankind, thus, be viewed as an unpremeditated by-product, as some serious task's débris, which for the moment rather clutters this corner of death's workroom. Others will play with the notion--which, as I remember, Felix Kennaston once suggested,--of life's having somehow got into the material universe as a small, alien, unwelcome interloper; and will suspect this is the reason that death appears to come upon us and our labors frowningly, as the vexed housewife comes toward the unloved weavings of the spider, just seen. But, in either case, the poets are sonorously agreed that never while time lasts can man's existence really matter; for time, they say, is death's broom. VII DIVERSIONS OF THE ANCHORITE "He shaved himself, and changed his raiment, and came in unto Pharaoh.... And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it upon Joseph's hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck; and he made Joseph to ride in the second chariot which he had; and they cried before him:--'Bow the knee!'... And in the plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls." _7._ _Diversions of the Anchorite_ § 60