



Transcribed from the 1893 John Lane edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays


Contents

The Rhythm of Life
Decivilised
A Remembrance
The Sun
The Flower
Unstable Equilibrium
The Unit of the World
By the Railway Side
Pocket Vocabularies
Pathos
The Point of Honour
Composure
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
James Russell Lowell
Domus Angusta
Rejection
The Lesson of Landscape
Mr. Coventry Patmore's Odes
Innocence and Experience
Penultimate Caricature




THE RHYTHM OF LIFE


If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.  Periodicity
rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the
orbit of his thoughts.  Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured,
velocities not ascertained, times not known.  Nevertheless, the
recurrence is sure.  What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it
does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.
Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the