James Lane Allen

“ For all round the earth wherever its actual mountains are high enough, their summits pierce the level of eternal cold: above us everywhere lies the unseen land of eternal cold. And there again near those summits your eye, searching for some mitigation of the solitude, would come upon the evergreen. ”

“ The eagle is a winged candle burning to cinders on a peak of air. The albatross is a floating conflagration with all the ineffectual sea drenching its back and breast. The polar bear is a four-branch candle in a candlestick of snow. ”

“ THE LAST CHRISTMAS TREE LIFE on this earth, my children, means warmth. Do not forget that: whatever else it may be, life as we know it is warmth. Every living earthly thing is on fire and every fire is perpetually going out. When the warmth, when the fire, which is within us and which is perpetually going out, goes out for good, that is the end of us. It is the end of us as far as the life which we derive from the planet is ourselves. If our planetary life is our only life, when the planetary fire within us dies out, all of us dies out. ”

“ SINCE the unknown day of the first unknown snowbank, the earth has made no revolution, has not once turned over from side to side without keeping undeviatingly in the straight road toward the fulfilment of that epitaph, Time’s epitaph. Never since then, though fighting with all its fires, has it been able to drive off that pallid visitant from outer space, never has it been able to prevent the persistent return of that appalling stranger. ”

“ But among them all not one has possessed the awful beauty, the chaste splendor, the universality, of this new trouble of hers with the tiny crystal.
We are well accustomed as we look out upon Nature at close range to see great creatures harrassed by little creatures. The lot of each big one seems to be in the keeping of some little one, which never quits it, nags it, stings it, wears it out, drives it desperate, makes life somewhat a burden to it and death somewhat a relief. ”

“ But meantime life on this earth implies warmth and carries warmth: that at least we positively have found out though without knowing what warmth is. Every living terrestrial creature is a candle, is a lamp. ”

“ We human beings are laughing and tear-dripping candles, descending swiftly to our sockets. The sun and the stars are candles, whirling golden candles in the night of the universe, a long, long night. One by one they too burn down at those brief intervals which we with our puny measurements call ages. ”

“ Why, some wintry day when you in overcoat and gloves are tramping comfortably across your fields on which snow is falling, stop and draw off one of your gloves, and holding out your hand, catch one of these little terrors, one of these dread arrows from the unseen quiver of all whiteness. ”

“ If planetary fire be not our only vital flame, vital energy, then planetary [Pg 4] dust and ashes are not the complete end of us, not the last word of our terrible lovable human story. And if this be true, what next may come, what kind of story will then begin with ourselves as its characters, what sort of existence for us will emerge from planetary extinction—that has always been the one greatest question, solicitude, hope, help, song, prayer of our race. ”

“ The candles may last as long as the master of the revels requires them; and then perhaps at some strange daybreak of which we can conceive naught, they will go out to the final one—all go out at the coming-on of day. A strange day indeed without any suns, without any stars, these having been consumed during the ancient night. What our human race has always most wished to know, most liked to believe, is that Nature, the whole universe of Nature, is itself but a troubled night of being; and that when Nature has come to some kind of end, the night of existence will have come to an end also. ”

“ There they are again, the fingers of a child!”
“Hearken!” whispered the fir below. “Down in the valley elfin horns are blowing and elfin drums beat. Do you not hear them—faint and far away. And that sound— [Pg 33] was it not the bells of the reindeer! It passed: it was a wandering soul of Christmas.”
“But they are all around me! They are all around you! Myriads and myriads are coming, are on the way toward us, the last of their Christmas trees. The souls of all children, wide-awake, are gathering about us ere we pass into the earth’s sleep.” ”

“ Perhaps caught in the raging, roaring tempest, perhaps having lost its way, some bird of brilliant-red plumage flew round and round like a wandering ball of fire, uttering its cry of bewilderment, of helplessness, of its fate—the prophetic note of the fate of everything. ”

“ And now for us who live on the earth to-day, looking out upon the battle between the planet and the snowflake, how fares the fighting?
[Pg 17]
IF you should start from your home in our north-temperate latitude and travel northward steadily on and on, after a while you would find that the air gradually grows colder, myriads of living things begin to be left behind; fewer and fewer remain; those that do remain, whether animals or birds or flowers, begin to lose gorgeous color, begin to become white. ”

“ On a steep mountain’s side near its bald summit thousands of feet above the line that any other living thing had ever crossed, stood two glorious fir trees, strongest and last of their race. They had climbed out of the valley below to this height and had so rooted themselves in rock and soil that the wildest gales had never been able to dislodge them. ”

“ Where is he now?”
“Once when he was very proud he said that he had a Creator who made him to lie down in green pastures.”
“He lies in white pastures. All the millions of his race lie in white pastures, not green pastures.” ”

“ Some time in the future, we do not know when, but some time the cold at the north will have moved so far southward; the cold at the south will have moved so far northward; the [Pg 20] cold in the upper air will have moved so far downward, that the three will meet and when they meet there will be for the earth one whiteness, one silence—rest: all troubled or untroubled things will be at rest. ”