The Cause is, and how they that seek their ain are no worthy thereof."

I took the book, and found in the legends of Brutus, and Cocles, and
Scaevola, and the retreat to the Mons Sacer, and the Gladiator's war, what
The Cause was, and forgot awhile in those tales of antique heroism and
patriotic self-sacrifice my own selfish longings and sorrows.

* * * * *

But, after all, the very advice which was meant to cure me of those selfish
longings, only tended, by diverting me from my living outward idol, to turn
my thoughts more than ever inward, and tempt them to feed on their
own substance. I passed whole days on the workroom floor in brooding
silence--my mind peopled with an incoherent rabble of phantasms patched
up from every object of which I had ever read. I could not control my
daydreams; they swept me away with them over sea and land, and into the
bowels of the earth. My soul escaped on every side from my civilized
dungeon of brick and mortar, into the great free world from which my body
was debarred. Now I was the corsair in the pride of freedom on the dark
blue sea. Now I wandered in fairy caverns among the bones of primaeval
monsters. I fought at the side of Leonidas, and the Maccabee who stabbed
the Sultan's elephant, and saw him crushed beneath its falling bulk. Now
I was a hunter in tropic forests--I heard the parrots scream, and saw the
humming birds flit on from gorgeous flower to flower. Gradually I took
a voluntary pleasure in calling up these images, and working out their
details into words with all the accuracy and care for which my small
knowledge gave me materials. And as the self-indulgent habit grew on me,
I began to live two lives--one mechanical and outward, one inward and
imaginative. The thread passed through my fingers without my knowing it;
I did my work as a machine might do it. The dingy stifling room, the wan