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 
