it, leaving
him with no thoughts but those of sensuous
desire; and he is in the same hopeless state
as the man who dies mad with drink. What
good has the drunkard obtained by his
madness? None; pain has at last swallowed
up pleasure utterly, and death steps in to
terminate the agony. The man suffers the final
penalty for his persistent ignorance of a law
of nature as inexorable as that of gravitation,--a
law which forbids a man to stand still.
Not twice can the same cup of pleasure be
tasted; the second time it must contain either
a grain of poison or a drop of the elixir of life.
The same argument holds good with regard
to intellectual pleasures; the same law operates.
We see men who are the flower of their
age in intellect, who pass beyond their fellows
and tower over them, entering at last upon a
fatal treadmill of thought, where they yield
to the innate indolence of the soul and begin
to delude themselves by the solace of repetition.
Then comes the barrenness and lack of
vitality,--that unhappy and disappointing
state into which great men too often enter
when middle life is just passed. The fire of
youth, the vigor of the young intellect, conquers
the inner inertia and makes the man
scale heights of thought and fill his mental
lungs with the free air of the mountains. But
then at last the physical reaction sets in; the
physical machinery of the brain loses its powerful
impetus and begins to relax its efforts,
simply because the youth of the body is at an
end. Now the man is assailed by the great
tempter of the race who stands forever on the
ladder of life waiting for those who climb so
far. He drops the poisoned drop into the ear,
and from that moment all consciousness takes
on a dulness, and the man becomes terrified
lest life is losing its possibilities for him. He
rushes back on to a familiar platform of
experience, and there finds comfort in touching
a well-known chord of passion or emotion.
And too many having done this linger on,
afraid to attempt the unkno
Notka biograficzna
Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine CH, KBE (May 14, 1853August 31, 1931), usually known as Hall Caine, was a British author. He is best known as a novelist and playwright of the late Victorian and the Edwardian eras. In his time he was exceedingly popular and at the peak of his success his novels outsold those of his contemporaries. Many of his novels were also made into films. His novels were primarily romantic in nature, involving the love triangle, but they did also address some of the more serious political and social issues of the day.
Harold MacGrath (September 4, 1871 - October 30, 1932) was a bestselling American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Also known occasionally as Harold McGrath, he was born in Syracuse, New York. As a young man, he worked as a reporter and columnist on the Syracuse Herald newspaper until the late 1890s when he published his first novel, a romance titled Arms and the Woman. According to the New York Times, his next book, The Puppet Crown, was the No.7 bestselling book in the United States for all of 1901. From that point on, MacGrath never looked back, writing novels for the mass market about love, adventure, mystery, spies, and the like at an average rate of more than one a year. He would have three more of his books that were among the top ten bestselling books of the year. At the same time, he penned a number of short stories for major American magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, and Red Book magazine. Several of MacGraths novels were seriali
Mabel Collins (9 September 1851 - 31 March 1927) was a theosophist and author of over 46 books. She was born in St Peter Port, Guernsey.