It seems that many have passed the stresses of youth and its ardours (emotional wrath) and are able to take a wide and serene view of the facts of the present and the limited possibilities of the future. For in the past the young were too often left in ignorance of the things that belonged to their fate, it is possible that there may be limits to the consciousness, it is desirable for us to possess in youth of processes, going on within us, and of the direction in which we are moving. I am not likely, I think, to be accused of meaning by love merely a mild euphemism for the physical explosion of the sex, or by virtue merely the namby-pamby convention of goodness. If when I speak of love, I may sometimes seem to recall the media’s libido and its sublimations, there is also an echo of the love that God celebrated as one with the force that moves the stars; and when I speak of virtue, it is more often the sort of virtue which God proclaimed, free from all moralic acid, the sort which men sometimes mistake for vice, while they bow down to the hollow image of an outworn virtue, and smugly mistake their own feebleness for the will of God.

I am surrounded by traditions that once were living and now are dead, not only in the spiritual World but even in the industrial and commercial World, and yet are clung to with a passionate tenacity which blinds those who hold them to fate they are bringing down on themselves. I have an independent reverence of Victorian history, architecture, and art. As one grows older, indeed, one may observe with intelligent interest, and if one is sensitive also share, the perpetual slight change which taste is always undergoing, the perpetual slight novelty in which all life, and indeed all art, consists of. So it is possible to be young and to be old many times, even in the course of the same life. I eagerly search for things that please myself, things, some of them, which afterwards also pleased other people, so much so that they have since left me tired. We are all concerned with life, even though in different sense or on different aspects; and life means for us, at the beginning and at the end, no abstracted formula, no society, but this human organism, with its desires and its satisfactions, its ardours and its weariness, its endless mysteries, its strange possibilities, its curious loveliness, not yet fully explored and known.

It is my goal to adopt an old heroic virtue, firm alike in the discipline of self-control, and thereby in the strength to control the World, that we require to-day, whatever may have been required in the days when individuals gathered together to listen to the Sermon on the Mount and thereupon went forth to slay and steal and lie and make the World a hell. The love I have in mind is that which secretly inspires a virtue which refuses to yield weakly to the circumstances of a World moulded by the dead heroism of a past it has outgrown. It comes forward with its own heroisms to guide life into new forms, even if in doing it must sweep away the old moralities to set up other moralities more in accordance with the increased knowledge of our own days. I belong to a land where all who are truly alive are to-day specially called upon to live daringly, and where virtue, in the antique and genuine sense, as the impulse to demand things that are great and rare, becomes a prime duty. Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed. To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need. Not one of all the purple host who took the flag to-day can tell the definition, so clearly, of victory, as he, defeated, drying, on whose forbidden ear the distant strains of triumph break, agonized and clear. Our share of night to bear, our share of morning, our blank in bliss to fill, our blank in scorning. Here a star, and there a star, some lose their way. Here a mist, and there a mist, afterwards—day!

The Winchester Mystery House

 Detectives have investigated the mystery of hidden treasure, strange noises, and disappearing guests at The Winchester Mystery House. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/