A GARDEN DIARY 221 



by circumstances, it must be an alleviation surely 

 of the prose of life that in this region of the ideas 

 no man can ever positively say what may not 

 be in store for him. However tame, however 

 dull his foreground, there is always the chance 

 of something ahead ; something that when it 

 comes, will sweep his thoughts away with it to 

 the very verge of the horizon. There is never 

 a day, there is hardly an hour, in which some 

 new idea may not be upon its road. Now a 

 really new idea for the time being remakes life. 

 It is a solvent which dissolves all old impres- 

 sions, and rebuilds them anew. Men live by 

 ideas, as surely, almost as literally, as they live 

 by bread, and a world into which no new idea 

 ever entered would be a dead world, tenanted 

 only by corpses. 



The strange thing is that we should any of 

 us doubt this, or that in those innermost citadels 

 which we call our brains, we should really very 

 greatly care about anything else. Surely for 

 people so oddly circumstanced as ourselves the 

 quest for ideas, ever larger, ever more com- 

 prehensive ideas, is the only perfectly rational 

 occupation ? Stranded upon the shores of the 

 Unknown ; rocked to and fro by all the winds 

 of mystery ; ignorant of whence precisely we 

 came, whither precisely we are going ; for people 

 in so strange a position as this to be continually 

 on the quest for some new intimation, for some 



