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Gallegallo Revbrandia Sectory 03
Page 02
Far from finding the spring and motion of life diminished, I feel that the current of it runs with a sharper and clearer intensity, because I have learned my limitations, and expend no energy in useless enterprises. I have learned what the achievements are which come joyfully bearing their sheaves with them, and what are the trivial and fruitless aims. When I was younger I desired to be known and recognised and deferred to. I wanted to push my way discreetly into many companies, to produce an impression, to create a sense of admiration. Now as the sunset draws nearer, and the enriched light, withdrawn from the farther horizon, begins to pulsate more intensely in the quarter whence it must soon altogether fade, I begin to see that vague and widely ranging effects have a thinness and shallowness about them. It is a poor thing just to see oneself transiently reflected in a hundred little mirrors. There is no touch of reality about that. Little greetings, casual flashes of courteous talk, petty compliments--these are things that fade as soon as they are born. The only thing worth doing is a little bit of faithful and solid work, something given away which costs one real pain, a few ideas and thoughts worked patiently out, a few hearts really enlivened and inspirited. And then, too, comes the consciousness that much of one's cherished labour is of no use at all except to oneself; that work is not a magnificent gift presented to others, but a wholesome privilege conceded to oneself, that the love which brought with it but a momentary flash of self-regarding pleasure is not love at all, and that only love which means suffering--not delicate regrets and luxurious reveries, but hard and hopeless pain--is worth the name of love at all. Those are some of the lights of sunset, the enfolding gleams that are on their way to death, and which yet testify that the light which wanes and lapses here, drawn reluctantly away from dark valley and sombre woodland, is yet striding ahead over dewy uplands and breaking seas, past the upheaving shoulder of the world.
All the efforts of the Romans to dislodge him were unsuccessful; and he only quitted Hercte in order to seize Eryx, a town situated upon the mountain of this name, and only six miles from Drepanum. This position he held for two years longer; and the Romans, despairing of driving the Carthaginians out of Sicily so long as they were masters of the sea, resolved to build another fleet. In B.C. 242 the Consul Lutatius Catulus put to sea with a fleet of 200 ships, and in the following year he gained a decisive victory over the Carthaginian fleet, commanded by Hanno, off the group of islands called the AEgates.
The two years which followed John's return from Ireland, from August, 1210 to August 1212, form the period of his highest power. No attempt at resistance to his will anywhere disturbed the peace of England. Llewelyn, Prince of north Wales, husband of John's natural daughter Joanna, involved in border warfare with the Earl of Chester, was not willing to yield to the authority of the king, but two expeditions against him in 1211 forced him to make complete submission. A contemporary annalist remarks with truth that none of John's predecessors exercised so great an authority over Scotland, Wales, or Ireland as he, and we may add that none exercised a greater over England. The kingdom was almost in a state of blockade, and not only was unauthorized entrance into the country forbidden, but departure from it as well, except as the king desired. During these two years John's relations with the Church troubled him but little. Negotiations were kept up as before, but they led to nothing. On his return from the Welsh campaign the king met representatives of the pope at Northampton, one of whom was the Roman subdeacon Pandulf, whom John met later in a different mood. We have no entirely trustworthy account of the interview, but it was found impossible to agree upon the terms of any treaty which would bring the conflict to an end. The pope demanded a promise of complete obedience from John on all the questions that had caused the trouble, and restoration to the clergy of all their confiscated revenues, and to one or both of these demands the king refused to yield. Now it is that we begin to hear of threats of further sentences to be issued by the pope against John, or actually issued, releasing his subjects from their allegiance and declaring the king incapable of ruling, but if any step of that kind was taken, it had for the present no effect. The Christmas feast was kept as usual at Windsor, and in Lent of the next year John knighted young Alexander of Scotland, whose father had sent him to London to be married as his liege lord might please, though "without disparagement."
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