The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

THE PILLAR OF CLOUD OBSESSED by the chimera of his mind, lost in the labyrinth of his imagination, man wanders on through the shadowy dream- land he himself has begotten, slothfully accepting or eagerly rejecting, but ever seeking some unobtainable freedom, some power which will release him from those shackles he has in his studied folly and capricious ignorance welded to his thoughts. Nothing contents him, nothing satisfies him ; if he is not weeping he is laughing, if he is not laughing he is weeping; he grumbles and applauds, despises and reveres, insults and beslavers, loves and hates, fingers everything in turn, and when he has nothing further to soil and to thumb-mark sits down and cries for the moon, or else like the dog in the fable seeing his own image in the river of his dreams, loses all he has in the vain attempt to grasp more. Slave to his own tyranny, shrieking under his own lash, the higher he builds the gloomy walls of his prison the louder he howls “Liberty”: freedom is what he craves, yearns, and strives for—freedom to leap into some miasmal bog and wallow. If he is a ploughman he wants more fields to till ; if a physician, more bodies to cure; if a priest, more souls to save; if a soldier, more countries to conquer; if a lawyer, more wretches to hang. If he obtains “more,” he grumbles 223