Even in the jungle and the wilderness the compass still points. “Lord, Lord, that I were dead!” they are for ever crying. O thou soft natural death that art joint-twin To sweetest slumber—— The pageant of the world is marvellous, but the pageant of the world is vanity. glories Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams And shadows soon decaying: on the stage Of my mortality my youth hath acted Some scenes of vanity—— To die and be quit of it all is their desire; the bell that tolls throughout the drama is death and disenchantment. All life is but a wandering to find home, When we’re gone, we’re there. Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. To this, life at its most reckless and abundant, they reply Man is a tree that hath no top in cares, No root in comforts; all his power to live Is given to no end but t’ have power to grieve. It is this echo flung back and back from the other side of the play which, if it has not the name, still has the effect of the presence of the Gods. So we ramble through the jungle, forest, and wilderness of Elizabethan drama. So we consort with Emperors and clowns, jewellers and unicorns, and laugh and exult and marvel at the splendour and humour and fantasy of it all. A noble rage consumes us when the curtain falls; we are bored too, and nauseated by the wearisome old tricks and florid bombast. A dozen deaths of full-grown men and women move us less than the suffering of one of Tolstoi’s flies. Wandering in the maze of the impossible and tedious story suddenly some passionate intensity seizes us; some sublimity exalts, or some melodious snatch of song enchants. It is a world full of tedium and delight; pleasure and curiosity, of extravagant laughter, poetry, and splendour. But gradually it comes over us, what then are we being denied? What is it that we are coming to want so persistently that unless we get it instantly we must seek elsewhere? It is solitude. There is no privacy here. Always the door opens and some one comes in. All is shared, made visible, audible, dramatic. Meanwhile, as if tired with company, the mind steals off to muse in solitude; to think, not to act; to comment, not to share; to explore its own darkness, not the bright-lit-up surfaces of others. It turns to Donne, to Montaigne, to Sir Thomas Browne—the keepers of the keys of solitude. _Montaigne_