Attempt > Volume 1 and Select writings

THE ATTEMPT
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make roads, and do all other patriotic works with all our souls, since Rome is more to
us than any private interest, and we play for higher stakes in her name than ever we
do in our own. This being the frame of mind of the ancients, let us see what a
thinker of modern times can find to tell us, as the result of his outlook over humanity.
His sight is keen, he it said, and he gazes from an intellectual watchtower which gives
him the pre-eminence over most minds of his time.—“ All that is without us will
change while we think not of it; much even that is within us To-day is not
yesterday, for man or for thing. Yesterday, there was the oath of Love ; to-day, has
come the curse of Hate. Hot willingly : ah, no ; hut it could not help coming. The
golden radiance of youth, would it willingly have tarnished itself into the dimness of
age 1 Tearful: how we stand enveloped, deep sunk, in that mystery of Time ; and
are Sons of Time ; fashioned and woven out of Time ; and on us, and on all that we
have, or see, or do, is written—Rest not, Continue not, Forward to thy doom ! ”
So he : graceful, beautiful Greece, has faded out of her place among the nations
with the pathetic fading of a lovely flower; intrepid, strong-handed Rome has fallen
from her pinnacle with the miserable fall of one who exchanges the patriot’s rough
truth and the soldier’s steady shield, for the emperor’s rose-crown and the courtier’s
smooth lie : years have gone by since these succumbed; other nations have risen and
become forces in the universe of things; newer civilization and life-giving religion
have added their quota to the new influences that govern humanity; and yet, after all,
our nineteenth century thinker speaks much as did the earlier Greek, only with wider
experience and more comprehension of his subject, and therefore with a more fixed
melancholy, a deeper conviction of the truth of his own words.
And is there one of us who does not feel the weight of them from his very soul ?
Is there one of us who reaches, in his life-journey, the goal he vowed to strive for
when he set forth; nay, is there one to whom the goal itself does not vary ere it is
attained 1
Our lives are passed on the great ocean of change; no two hours or moments are
alike, and God only knows how passionately we long at times to arrest some of these,
and press them, as it were, into the living mould of our hearts, with all their colours
fresh, instead of which, we must be contented with the pale cast taken of them after
death, by the sculptor Memory. It can never he otherwise ; the great ocean must be
traversed once in a life time, and there is no stopping or turning back between the two
shores of Birth and Death. Kind hands set the sails and launch the boat from the
one, and the little helmsman thinks the voyage an easy one, but the salt spray and the
biting winds will have hardened his cheek and roughened his grey hair, ere he reaches