‘And they are gone: ay, ages long ego
Those lovers ded away into the storm.’
There the pathos of the lapse of time arises from the imagined fusion of the two perceptive modes by one intensity of emotion. Shakespeare, in the springtime of the modern world, fuses the two elements by exhibiting the infectiousness of gay immediacy:—
‘. . . daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; . . .’
(The Winter’s Tale, IV, iv, 118-120.)
But sometimes men are overstrained by their undivided attention to the causal elements in the nature of things. Then in some tired moment there comes a sudden relaxation, and the mere presentational side of the world overwhelms with the sense of its emptiness. As William Pitt, the Prime Minister of England through the darkest period of the French Revolutionary wars, lay on his death-bed at England’s worst moment in that struggle, he was heard to murmur,
‘What shades we are, what shadows we pursue!’
His mind had suddenly lost the sense of causal efficacy, and was illuminated by the remembrance of
