THE NARRATIVE 



Chaptee I 



PARADISE LOST 



There arc hours long departed which memory brings 

 Like blossoms of Eden to twine round the heart. 



Moore. 



The wise men tell us that the world is growing happier— that we live 

 longer than did our fathers, have more of comfort and less of toil, fewer 

 wars ami discords, and higher hopes and aspirations. So say the wise 

 men; but deep in our own hearts we know they are wrong. For were 

 not we. too. liorn in Arcadia, and have we not— each one of us— in that 

 May of life when the world was young, started out lightly and airily 

 along the path that led through green meadows to the blue mountains 

 on the distant horizon, beyond which lay the great world we were to 

 conquer? And though others dropped behind, have we not gone on 



through morning brightness and 1 nday heat, with eyes always 



steadily forward, until the fresh grass began to bo parched and 

 withered, and the way grew hard and stony, and the blue mountains 

 resolved into gray rocks and thorny cliffs.' And when at last we 

 reached the toilsome summits, we found the glory that had lured us 

 onward was only the sunset glow that fades into darkness while we 

 look, and leaves us at the very goal to sink down, tired in body aud 

 sick at heart, with strength and courage gone, to close our eyes and 

 dream again, not of the fame and fortune that were to be ours, but only 

 of the old-time happiness that we have left so far behind. 



As with men, so is it with nations. The lost paradise is the world's 

 dreamland of youth. What tribe or people has not had its golden 

 age, before Pandora's box was loosed, when women were nymphs and 

 dryads and men were gods and heroes! And when the race lies 

 crushed and groaning beneath an alien yoke, how natural is the dream 

 of a redeemer, an Arthur, who shall return from exile or awake from 

 some long sleep to drive out the usurper and win back for his people 

 what they have lost. The hope becomes a faith and the faith becomes 

 the creed of priests and prophets, until the hero is a god and the dream 

 a religion, looking to some great miracle of nature for its culmination 

 and accomplishment. The doctrines of the Hindu avatar, the Hebrew 

 Messiah, the Christian millennium, and the Hesunanin of tbe Indian 

 Ghost dance are essentially the same, and have their origin in a hope 

 and longing common to all humanity. 



