THE PASSING 69 



even carried it into an insistence on the unchange- 

 ableness of heaven: 



A place where all the year is May, 

 Where every bird doth sit and sing 

 Continually, as in the Spring. 



"No change at all there," runs another foretaste ; 

 "no Winter and Summer; not like the poor com- 

 forts here, but a bliss always flourishing." 



Poor comforts, in sooth! The largesse of Nature 

 may be of scant interest to those who ever look be- 

 fore and after, at the expense of the present, but 

 for your rational watcher of the earth there is 

 throbbing joy in the coming, and sober content in 

 the going, of all seasons. Closely, reader, and still 

 more closely, mark the pageantry enveloping the 

 broad-bosomed mother of us all; then will you find 

 yourself at one with most of the Jovian moods 

 not wishing vaguely for what cannot be, not seek- 

 ing needless consolation in the thought of an un- 

 changeable future, but rather associating yourself 

 with the feelings of the poet and the Gull who 

 basked, in golden weather, beside the blue Pacific: 



We two may be forgiven 



If, having found a heaven on earth, 



We ask an earth in heaven. 



