Here-- "Here where the world is quiet"-- Here, indeed, his ancestor had built a haven of rest.
"From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea." As the lines floated across his memory, the Master had a mind to employ them in his peroration (giving them a Christian trend, of course) in place of the sonnet he had meant to quote.

This would involve reconstructing a longish paragraph; but they had touched his mood, and he spent some time pacing to and fro under the trees before his taste rejected them as facile and even cheap in comparison with Wordsworth's-- "Men unto whom sufficient for the day, And minds not stinted or untill'd are given, -- Sound healthy children of the God of heaven-- Are cheerful as the rising sun in May." "Yes, yes," murmured the Master, "Wordsworth's is the better.
But what a gift, to be able to express a thought just _so_--with that freshness, that noble simplicity! And even with Wordsworth it was fugitive, lost after four or five marvellous years.

No one not being a Greek has ever possessed it in permanence.

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