Gloria Mundi

( Originally Published 1922 )

HAVE you ever really thought upon the beauty of this world which is passing away before your eyes? You have read the words, "The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing", but have you ever thought that they might bear another sense than the Holy Book gives them?

For my part, when I come to die I know what my chief regret will be. Not for my poor human sins, which have really hurt nobody save myself and most of which I will have forgot-ten. Not because I have missed the laurel which was the darling dream of my youth. Not because I have always fallen short of my ideal and, still worse, betrayed my own dearest hopes. Not for the selfish reason that I have never been able to gain that position of independence and security which would enable me to work with a free mind. Not for having failed to score in any one particular what the world calls a success. Not for these nor any other of the vain desires that mock the human heart in its last agony.

No; I shall simply be sorry that I failed to enjoy so much of the beauty of this dear earth and sky, or even to mark it in my hurry through the days, my reckless pleasures, my stupid tasks that yielded me nothing. I shall think with utter bitterness of the time out of all the time given me I might have passed in profitably looking at the moon. Or in marking with an eye faithful to every sign, the advance of the bannered host of Summer unto the scattered and whistling disarray of Autumn. How many of those wonderful campaigns have I really seen?—alas! I know too well how many I have numbered.

There was a rapture of flowing water that always I was promising myself I should one day explore to the full; and now I am to die without knowing it. There were days and weeks and months of the universe in all its glory bidding for my admiration; yet I saw nothing of it all. My baser senses solicited me beyond the cosmic marvels. I lost in hours of sleep, or foolish pleasure, or useless labor, spectacles of beauty which the world had been storing up for millions of ages—perhaps had not been able to produce before my brief day. I regret even the first years of life when the universe seemed only a pleasant garden to play in and the firmament a second roof for my father's house. Grown older but no wiser, I planned to watch the sky from dawn to sunset and, on another occasion, from sunset to dawn; but my courage or patience failed me even for this poor enterprise. I was a beggar at a feast of incomparable riches, and something always detained me from putting forth my hand; or I left the table which the high gods had spread and went eating husks with swine. And now I am to die hungry, self-robbed of my share at the banquet of immortal beauty—can Christian penitence find anything to equal the poignancy of such a regret?

Yet even as I write I am cheating myself in the old bankrupt fashion, for the day outside my window is like a tremulous golden fire, and the world overflows with a torrent of green life —life that runs down from the fervid heaven and suspires through the pregnant earth. It is the first of June, when Nature, like a goddess wild with the pangs of delivery, moves the whole earth with her travail, filling every bosom with the sweet and cruel pain of desire. Now she takes account of nothing that does not fecundate, conceive or produce, intent only upon securing her own immortal life. And though she has done this a million and a mil-lion ages, yet is she as keen of zest as ever; as avid for the full sum of her desire as when she first felt the hunger of love and life; as unwearied as on the morning of Creation.