Some had
declined with a sort of unambitious comfort, some had fallen into
the trough of Toryism, and spent their time in holding fast to
conventional and established things; one or two had flown like
Icarus so near the sun that their waxen wings had failed them; and
yet some of us had missed greatness by so little. Was it to be
always so? Was it always to be a battle against hopeless odds? Was
defeat, earlier or later, inevitable? The tamest defeat of all was
to lapse smoothly into easy conventional ways, to adopt the
standards of the world, and rake together contentedly and seriously
the straws and dirt of the street. If that was to be the destiny of
most, why were we haunted in youth with the sight of that cloudy,
gleaming crown within our reach, that sense of romance, that
phantom of nobleness? What was the significance of the aspirations
that made the heart beat high on fresh sunlit mornings, the dim and
beautiful hopes that came beckoning as we looked from our windows
in a sunset hour, with the sky flushing red behind the old towers,
the sense of illimitable power, of stainless honour, that came so
bravely, when the organ bore the voices aloft in the lighted chapel
at evensong? Was all that not a real inspiration at all, but a mere
accident of boyish vigour? No, it was not a delusion--that was life
as it was meant to be lived, and the best victory was to keep that
hope alive in the heart amid a hundred failures, a thousand cares.
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