VI

THE WHITE WATER LILY

IN Theodore Storm's modest little classic Immensee, a book which epitomizes the tragedy of a vanished hope, the young man walks in the pale calm moonlight by the shores of a tranquil inland sea. Before his eyes fair pictures come and go. He sees

"Such sights as youthful poets dream

On summer eve by haunted stream."

Far out upon the crystal surface of the fair and placid lake like a fallen star there gleams a solitary water lily, white as the clouds that float beneath the blue sky of a summer's day. An indescribable longing to possess the lonely flower seizes the young man's heart. Soon the sturdy strokes of the swimmer break the stillness of the silent night. He swims and swims, but still the lily is far, far in the dim distance. At last he turns his face shoreward and never once does he look back upon the fragrant bloom which he had so ardently longed to make his own. To this young man the white flower symbolized one whom he had

loved and lost in the days when his sky was gilded with the auroral light of youthful romance and his heart sang the dulcet strains of love's old sweet song. But to strive for the unattainable is the common lot of man.

We all live in two worlds. We know full well this practical, everyday world, this world of getting and spending, where the fittest survive and the weak go down in the fight, where the blight of sin and ignorance causes the fairest flowers of life to fade and wither. It is this realm of which Shelley sings in words of real pathos:

"We look before and after,

And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught.
Our sweetest songs are those
That tell of saddest thought."

But we live, too, in another world: in the world of dreams: in the heaven-illumined land of the ideal. Here we forget the harsher realities of life and catch faint adumbrations of the golden days which are yet to be. Here there

66 falls not hail or rain or any snow,

...

Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair, with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea."

For many of us the land ideal looms up against the misty backgrounds of the past. There is that within man which makes him idealize bygone days. The remembrance of them brings to the heart that

"... feeling of sadness and longing
That is not akin to pain,

And resembles sorrow only

As the mist resembles the rain."

It is this feeling of sadness which the deepvoiced Tennyson describes in words of neverdying melody:

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.

Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy autumn fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.”

We stand upon the summit of the mountain and view the road by which we have ascended as it winds through the valley and over the foothills and our souls are thrilled by its beauty. We see it curve through sylvan dells, through fertile farms, through the tree-embowered village. We forget the long and toilsome journey, the blazing sun of the noonday, the summer storms that blew from the mountains. Across the emerald-clad sward of

the years, like the sound of sweet bells in tune, come the words of New England's crystaltoned bard:

"I can see the breezy dome of groves,
The shadows of Deering's Woods

And the friendships old and the early loves
Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves

In quiet neighborhoods.

And the verse of that sweet old song,

It flutters and murmurs still:

'A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'

"I remember the gleams and the glooms that dart Across the schoolboy's brain;

The song and the silence in the heart,

That in part are prophecies and in part

Are longings wild and vain.

And the voice of that fitful song

Sings on, and is never still:

'A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'

"Strange to me now are the forms I meet

When I visit the dear old town,

But the native air is pure and sweet,

And the trees that o'ershadow each well-known street,

As they balance up and down,

Are singing the beautiful song,

Are sighing and whispering still:

'A boy's will is the wind's will,

[And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." "

When fond memory throws the light of other days around us we live amid the Arcadian beauty of the land ideal.

But life's golden age is never in the past. Dreams of a brighter future make it easier for men to bear the burdens of a darkened present. The lank, ungainly backwoods boy, who lay before the open in a rude Illinois cabin reading over and over Mason Weems's quaint old Life of Washington, forgot the poverty and crudeness of his surroundings as he looked across the future's untrodden fields to the day when on his shoulders would rest the mantle of the Cincinnatus of the West. The boy who trod the towpaths of the Western Reserve dreamed of the thousands whom he should some day sway by the power of his eloquence.

On a rocky New England farm, so lonely that even now ever and anon the white-footed deer forsakes his leafy covert and drinks from the streamlet in the meadow, there lived and toiled a dark-eyed Quaker lad. How hard was his lot! How narrow his life! But Greenleaf Whittier had seen the vision. The plowboy of the Merrimac valley had heard the lutelike voice of the plowman of the bonnie fields of Ayr. The light that never was on land or sea shone over that barren little farm and the