Chapter III: Part 3

There is a place in every heart which must be filled by adoration, or else the whole will grow hard and wither like a garden whose central fountain is grown dry. And though the affection of mortal man or woman may abandon it, there remains yet this other love which by pure and strenuous invocation may be drawn to it, and dwell in it, to the ennoblement of life; so great is the care of providence for mortal need. Love is our need, and it is given, if we despair not of it, even to such as have rarely felt the glow of earthly passion. For love is of many kinds; yet the palest and most subtle of its forms are made real to those who believe, and may become the guiding influences of their lives. Such are the visions of the ideal love to which those glad natural sympathies now led me, leaving me alone awhile that I might worship the orient light. And when I came out from that presence I rejoiced indeed, for the path was clear for my return, and life was now glad with promise like an orchard burgeoning with white blossoms. Old memories crowded back on me of hours beneath the cedars with the Phaedrus and the Vita Nuova, hours made happy with intellectual and austere delights. But now the joy was other than intellectual, though significant tenfold, for then in untried youth I had wondered at the beauty of an imaginary world; now with eyes that had looked on desolation I perceived that these visions were true. For had they been no more than airy fancies, they surely had not endured throughout these long ages in our laden and mortal air.

It was not merely the beauty of a literary setting which had preserved them: the craftsman's skill might indeed have enhanced their natural splendour, but it could not have alone inspired them with this perennial life. The gem with fire in its heart outlives the delicate setting; though it may be maltreated and buried for centuries by the wayside, it will come to light when the gold that framed it is long battered or lost, and will be desired by new generations for its inherent and unalterable beauty.

Not Plato's or Dante's creative power, but truth surviving all incarnations of genius, has kept this celestial gem aglow: they have but celebrated that which was never mortal, and guided wandering eyes to heaven's most beautiful star. This intangible and unincarnate vision exacts more from its votaries than the love which walks the earth: holding the lover ever in the strain of apprehension, it inures him to unwearying worship, and itself moving in regions incorruptible, never loses the glory of its first hour. The years may pass, but one face, like a hallowed thing, abides continually; years may fret and corrode other ideals, but to this they add beauties of ever fresh significance. The auroral glow is always round it, brightening the world, until it becomes an emblem of illumination and the symbol of eternal truths. This visionary presence wakes aspiration to new effort and touches the intellect with passion; beleaguered thought sallies out with new strength, and the frontiers of darkness recede before it. From this comes the quickening of the heart without which hope wanes and the mind is barren: the deep pure joy of contemplation awakens all that is best in the soul, which goes towards it on tense wings of desire. And as with time it draws further from the earth, and, following, the soul essays ever higher flights, it is often poised at a great height as in a trance of motion, whence it looks back upon the world it has left, and round it upon other worlds. Then, its love-range being wondrously expanded, it sees beyond that visionary countenance, which dissolves and forms again like a delicate wreath of mist; and clear starlight falls upon it from every side, so that all shadow is destroyed. And when it returns to earth again, and is forced to contemplate meaner things, it is now aware that the very soil is compacted of dust of stars, and that he who looks listlessly upon creation is unworthy of the human name. And so continually flying forth and returning, it weaves endless bonds between the infinitesimal and the infinite, forgetting how to despise, which is the heavenly science.

All this ardour is awakened and sustained by love, which began in sense and is now transformed. Through each succeeding change it is known for the same divine power which has so attuned the body that it vibrates no more to desire alone, but is now become resonant beneath a faint and spiritual breath.

It is an old story that love is sightless, but that is the love which romps among the roses and is blinded by their thorns. There is another and a better tradition that love's eyes pierce heaven, and this is a great truth; for infinity is cold and vaporous until man projects upon it his mortal ideal, his conception of an earthly love transfigured. When this beloved guide appears throned above him as in the clouds, he dares to lift his eyes, and there he reads through its light the divine purports of his existence. Is it a small thing to stand, though but for a moment, searching infinity undismayed? This is the celestial ocean to whose shore he is come; and now "drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom, until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere ... beauty absolute, separate, simple, everlasting, which without diminution, without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever growing and perishing beauties of all other things."

To some the great perception comes but late, rising from the ashes of love's common furnace. But they whose hearts have never been consumed in these roaring flames may find it earlier; and purged from all taints of jealousy and covetousness, may pass straightway into the bliss of a higher union. This is that supreme affiance and espousal of the soul wherein they may be released into a larger air, undelayed by the earthward longings and gradual initiations of seemingly happier men. Thus its servants do not decline into slothful service, but are strenuous always; raised above the acquiescence of use, they never know the cloying of fruition or suffer the barbarian conquest of indifference. Their soul is unaffected by material circumstance or misfortune, and illuminates their lives as often as in the silent hour of meditation they concentrate their thoughts upon its grace. The cup of earthly love, even the noblest, is often dipped in Pyriphlegethon, and the draught it offers scathes the palate until its finest sensibility is for ever dulled. Those who have quaffed this liquid fire can no longer understand his mood who leaves the roses and the wine to toil through deserts in search of limpid water. They think him madly ungrateful for God's good gifts, a fool abandoning joy proved and present for a shadow far and incomprehensible. But they who have not denied themselves are no longer fit judges of him who has renounced. They cannot know that by this renunciation the senses are thrice refined, and receive as a vital influence the stellar beam which falls chill and ineffectual upon a grosser frame. They cannot believe that this love from the infinite distance wields as mighty a force over renunciant lives as the near flame of passion over their own. But, for all their denial, it lives and puissantly reigns. It reigns in very truth predominant, this ideal love to which space exists not and propinquity is nothing; and it will have none for its subjects but those who by bereavement or aspiration or intense purity are inly prepared for its dominion.

Happy therefore are the shy if in the midst of their tribulation they are guided to the gateway of so bright a kingdom. It may well be that we must first be led thither by some dear-remembered and virgin form once almost ours through earthly love, but now joined to us only by an imperishable and mystic union. Our sight may at first need the embodied beauty to give it the finer powers by which the revelation of the ideal grows familiar to us, but is at last attainable without mortal intervention by an immediate flight of the soul. Until that late day of enlightenment we must still be set upon the celestial path by a touch of human tenderness; a pure yet sensuous yearning must be ours when we are first girded to the ascent. If there are beings which attain the fulness of the ideal love without the first inspiration of a fair earthly form I know nothing in creation to which they may be likened, nor had I ever part in so rare an enfranchisement. The vision that now entrances my soul first arose from a living, breathing form radiant with earthly brightness and instinct with every charm which brings men fawning to the feet of women. The sensuous frenzy which lovers sing was also mine, the tremor of the heart, the vibration of the very life; the deep seventh wave of passion rioted through me also. But from the first amazement of the shaken being it was not given me to pass through satisfaction into tranquillity; I was held long in a whirl of trouble; in the anguish of denial I learned initiation into the mystery which is eternal and supreme.

It is good for some of earth's children that passion should be stayed before it makes ashes of the fancy; for if it does but touch for a moment only to be withdrawn for ever, it does not destroy, but by its meteoric passage kindles the imagination with the glow of an incorruptible flame. It is with them long enough to brand upon memory the image which, though never renewed before their bodily eyes, by its very severance from perception puts on an immortality of virginal grace. Love is understanding, said the poet of Heaven and Hell, and love ennobled through renunciant years shall at the last encompass the world. The sensuous glow that first quickened the heart of youth is transmuted into a purer fire akin to that which moves the spheres.

To know this truth is their compensation who are swiftly withdrawn from the warm radiance of earthly love. They are stricken, but before passion blinds them are rapt into a high solitude, whence, if they truly love, an infinite prospect is unrolled before them. They know desire; but as their passion was hopeless in this world, their steps were mercifully set upon a new path, whereby the bodily semblance of the beloved became the symbol of spiritual comeliness, alluring the beholder into the peace of a serene and unworldly mood. A thin and rarefied ideal, you say, a mirage which no wayfarer can approach: experience rejects these subtleties, and to these creations of a dream human affection was never given. True, to hearts established and content in happy unions, to minds preoccupied with the near cares and pleasures of a home, our distant visions may appear frail structures wrought in mist by homeless fancy. But for the exiled heart they are not such, but verities of abiding inspiration. For the ideal love did not die with Plato, but came again in mediaeval Italy, and who shall say that even our material age has banished it from the earth?

No indeed it is not dead, the ideal love, but indwells, a redeeming power, wherever there are desolate hearts and minds to be updrawn and united by its ministry; a power so lustral in its nature, that no abject and despairing thought creeps into its presence but is purified and exalted by its regard. This love brings hope and cheerful constancy; with a shining falchion it affrights into their natal darkness the monstrous forms of despair, and lends to all work a secret charm of chivalry. It sustains that high anticipatory mood to which life is but a preparation, and the bees buzzing round the honey-flowers seem poor things toiling for an inessential gain. Because it is mystic and transcendental it is the predestined guide of all whom fate holds removed from earthly love. This is the old device of the world's failures, you say, to trick themselves out in Plato's mantle or the schoolman's cowl, and conceal their spite beneath the pretensions of the mystic. But I answer that the causes which moved the Greek and the Florentine are still at work among mankind to-day; they have never ceased, however much obscured by the glare of triumphant luxury or the stress of miserable toil. Often when disillusion has laid bare a soul, this love which did but slumber awakes to contest with envy or despair the possession of a wounded heart. I aver that any exile from the happier earth whose heart is pure, if he invokes this love with ardent faith, may unbar his door and feel that it has passed his threshold. Let us never be persuaded that the ideal world is far from this earth of ours, or that the way to it may not be daily traversed by him who has submitted to the heavenly guide. Not even the close entanglement of common cares can avail to keep such an one from his love; but as Bishop Berkeley is said to have been able to pass in a moment from the consideration of trifling things to the throne of thrones and the seats of the Trinity, so this lover shall overpass with easy and habitual flight the barriers that hold most men life-long prisoners.

For to the Spirit that is chastened and endures there is given a power of flight and poise, by which, if it abandon itself to the celestial wind, it may instantly remove from the deeper planes of life, as a bird by the mere slanting of its wings is carried in proud quiescence into an upper region of the air. He shall know instant release from the leaguer of disillusion and vain solicitudes; in the light of one beautiful and compassionate countenance the unquiet memories of failure shall give up their exceeding bitterness.

And though the style and instinct of modern life are hostile to such love, though in prosperity it is ignored and in adversity often overborne by a vain uproar of lamentation, yet even in a self-indulgent and furious world it still draws many to the severe exaltation of its service. We cannot approach the heights where a Plato and a Dante walked with ease, but far beneath upon the lower slopes we can draw a breath of new life as we fix our weaker eyes upon the glory which they saw so near. Although the men who have there ascended are a supreme company, we may yet presume to follow; for let it never be said that the gods have reserved for surpassing genius the consolation of which lesser men have so much deeper need. But he who would reach a serener air must press forward strenuously; for as a mountain may have one bare and northern slope, and another sunlit and clothed with verdure, and yet there may be a path on each side to the summit, so it is with the ascent to this felicity. One lingers amid pleasant groves and laughing waters; another, undistracted by the beauty of any lower zone, but fixing his eyes upon the far summit, crosses the chill rocky slopes, never feeling the warmth of the sun and only seeing his brightness reflected from the highest peak. Though the ways of the two travellers lie far apart until the end, their endurance may be crowned with the same reward; but he who knew no dalliance and plucked no fruit has from the beginning seen the goal clearly, and lived steadfastly in its distant promise. And do you tell me that this is not love or joy, you who saunter in the verdant southern valleys breathing a present happiness with the perfume of a thousand flowers? Your way may lead you upward after long vicissitudes, but endurance will more swiftly fail you for the last most arduous ascent. Very love is of the heights, and he whose thoughts have long been thither exalted will breathe with least pain the attenuate upper air.

To this pilgrimage the diffident are foreordained; it is their happiest hour when they take staff and scrip and set out in earnest for the shrine built among the mountains. The gardens of Armida are not for them, nor the warm breezes fragrant of fruit and flowers; but the vision of a far peak flushed at sundawn draws them onward, and strength and peace are increased upon them throughout the great ascent. He is still too rich for pity to whom renunciation brings these high and enviable hours.

But the heavens are not opened every day, and the adept of these mysteries must walk the dull round of common life like other men, not warmed as they are by the glow of constant friendship, yet cheered by intermittent flames of remembrance and of hope. The real life of the diffident is cunningly hidden from those around them, for whom, indeed, it is wont to have faint interest; but before you who have often sought me out through fair and foul weather, I may venture to undo the pack of small resources which brings variety and distraction into lonely days.

Firstly, I still dare to haunt the forecourts of philosophy. Into her inner courts I may not penetrate, lacking the leisure which her whole service demands; yet the loiterings which I may still enjoy are to me like voyages into a foreign country, and give my mind the healthful enjoyment of change; they are not long enough to bring that whole detachment from daily life which, in my case, might prove a perilous advantage. All that I need for common use is a simple rule based on a few fundamental thoughts to give me a course upon the wayward ocean, and though it be full of error as the Almagest, yet it shall surpass the thumb-rules of Philistia. It must be a doctrine which allows imagination her right and durable career, and therefore not be monist. For materialism is too wildly imaginative at the start: like a runner who at the outset overstrains his heart and thereafter runs no more, the follower of this creed, by his postulate of a blind impersonal Law, exhausts his power of speed and plods henceforth eyes downward over flattest plains of dulness. That my mind may remain curious and alert in isolation, I must conceive in the universal scheme a power that does not alone impel, but also draws me forward. For were it true that the sum of things blunders from change to change, swept by blind force into uncharted voids, I should abandon myself in despair to that hopeless course, and drift indifferent to the direction or the end.

Let me rather believe that if each several idea is compacted by my active intelligence out of some vast system of relations, then only a supreme intelligence akin to man's can brace together the whole system or universal sum of things. For this earth, yes, and all the complex of the spheres, exist to me imperfectly as idea alone, nor can I conceive them any complete existence apart from a kindred but omniscient mind. Each advance in human knowledge should then be an infinitesimal approach towards the supreme comprehension; and the aspiring race of man is justified in that inchoation of long hope which is folly to the single life.

I would also believe that new relations between things may be detected not merely by the staid and ordered process of collating abstractions, which is science, but by swifter and more genial methods of intuition.

"Hurrah for positive science,
Long live exact demonstration!"

cried Walt Whitman, exulting over the filed fetters of mankind; and let us all echo the cry, nor ever forget the razed Bastilles of superstition. But there glimmers a wealth of truth in the penumbra beyond our lanterns to which science will creep too slowly without the aid of imagination. Yet this truth may be seized by swift sallies into the darkness, and assured to us as it were by some dim apperception of the soul, when the whole personality is made tense, and subtly anticipates the cosmic argument. Life is too short to renounce this daring: the sense of kinship with the All-Consciousness sanctions if not commands the right adventure.

It was this feeling which led William Blake to exclaim in his impulsive way, that to generalize is to be an idiot, that direct perception is all, and the slow process of the inductive reason a devil's machination. This method of intuition is to the more sober method of science as the romantic to the classical spirit in literature, permitting to the individual mind a licence of noble vagrancy. But it must be a law for the ordinary intelligence to exercise the two apart, else it will fall into sick fancies of excitement, and by abuse of wild analogies lose the vital art of balance and sane comparison. Only the greatest minds, endowed as it were with some divine genius of extrication, may dare to practise the two together. So Leonardo da Vinci drove inference and intuition abreast without disaster, and gathered from purple distances of thought their wildest and most splendid flowers. To him, as has been well said, philosophy was something giving strange swiftness and double sight, clairvoyant of occult gifts in common or uncommon things. The doom of Phaeton awaits those who now would follow that marvellous course; but the poetic observation of resemblances in things remote, which lent so rich a colour to the science of the Renaissance, may yet be trained in all our minds; and the philosophy which trusts in the slow suffusion of the worlds with intellectual light will bless and encourage its reasonable growth.

Such a philosophy brings also a living sympathy with art. For the artist ever sees a perfection of truth beyond his rendering, yet always calling for expression; there is something eternally missed by his highest effort, and he can never know complacency. The philosophy which conceives the gradual growth of form through consciousness towards a perfection infinitely removed, yet in its remoteness drawing up our life as the moon sways the tides--this surely is the artist's wisdom. Idealism is like love, {apora porimos}, holding us as it were in touch with the intangible: it will have us conceive the Absolute without that helpless absorption in thought which changed Amiel's life from a fountain to a vapour: it would keep us near the surf and confluence of things. Its function is not to give any mysterious transcendental knowledge, but to serve culture "by suggesting questions which help to detect the passion, and strangeness and dramatic contrasts of life." And not only to bring suggestions, but repose, by granting to eyes wearied with minute concerns the contrasts of vast times and spaces, the majestic idea of the Whole; to change the focus and variously dispose the perspectives of familiar things.

An old watchmaker, whose window overlooked a wide meadow, used ever and again to lay down his instruments to gaze out upon the expanse of green, pasturing upon it a wandering vague regard, and absorbing from it an assuagement of his wearied senses which, he said, served him more effectually after these bright interludes. The province of Metaphysics should be to us as to this wise workman his field; not a place to dream our days away in, but for occasional resort; in which we may forget the infinitesimal in healing visions of broad space and colour. I counsel every lonely man to satisfy what has been described as the common metaphysical instinct, and according to his powers to become a metaphysician. There is no discipline which so well consists with solitude, none which so instantly enfranchises the mind from the tyranny of mean self-interest or vain and envious polemics. Men do not grow sour and quarrelsome about the Absolute: everything that is polemical is inspired, as Michelet once said, by some temporal and momentary interest. The man who has climbed to the Idalian spring comes down benevolent. He does not grudge this toiling ant his grain, that snarling dog his bone, but is content to live serene, in the certainty that his soul has great provision, and that though all human things are small, each is worth its while. Into his hand there is given a scale by which life is known in its fair proportions; a tranquil joy, disturbed neither by dirges nor Epinician odes, is poured into his heart and exalts him above distraction. He respects himself as akin to that great Self whose perfection shall one day be known; he understands the passion for the ideal through which men die young; he wonders at envy and in the happiness of enfranchisement would have all men free.

The pages of this Almagest are for the exceptional hour; but daily, as one bookish from the nursery, I read much in many directions. For if books are called the best friends of happy men, to the sad they are saviours also. And when I remember too clearly what I am, I turn perhaps most often to Lucretius. For of all those who have taken up the pen to assuage the miseries of men, it is he who sings most bravely of the great endurance. This austere enthusiast, whose soul was never fused in the fire of friendship; who went apart, as it were, amid thunders upon the lonely heights; who, without any lover, yet loved his kind so well that all the years of his maturity, how short and splendid a period, were poured forth in one song of human consolation,--this man for all the madness of his creed, was yet aflame with a wisdom to be called divine. That calm face, lit with one desire--to drive the furies from the way and soothe the frightened children of men, is ever among the nobler countenances which fancy summons about my bed. Over the anxious heart they flow, those slow cadences, so vibrant yet so magnificently passionless, until the nerves of pain cease to throb, and fear shrinks as a taint impossible to the patient of such a physician. It is not his to intimidate or denounce, to evoke visions of lurid hell, to linger over dire vaticinations, or apportion to each his grade of torment, but with cool fingers to smooth the hair back from the forehead, and in grave, tender accents to say: Sleep now, for it was a dream.

Landor, in a fine passage, compared the merciful tolerance of the Roman poet with the pitiless ire of Dante, contrasting in respect of the quality of mercy these two poets, one in their austere perfection, but so different in their vision of death, and judgment, and ultimate reward. The seer of lost worlds has written his own defence, and was indeed but attacked to point the sharp antithesis; but Lucretius, though he owes it to a literary feint, is very finely praised. And to me it seems that his compassionate mood increased upon him just because he was not emulous of the world's gifts or earnest for its pleasures, but withdrew from the press, and lived out his few great years contemplating apart the vicissitudes of orbs and men. He did not wait in ante-chambers or sit at wedding feasts; but severing all entangling and intricate threads of observance, followed the voice which called him to solitary places of illimitable prospect. It was not through disillusion or injustice, or wounded pride, that he walked aloof; but loneliness was his birthright, and from the hills and headlands to which solitude allured his steps he saw the dust of mad encounters rise to heaven, and the rent sails of foundering galleys. He saw, and could not but be wrung with pity for man deafened to wise counsel by the noise of vanities, and fiercely conspiring to precipitate his doom. As he went by shore and upland, there gathered in his mind those resonant hexameters of warning or consolation, those similes from the life of husbandry and dumb things, which, set like diamonds in clay, lend to the most arid arguments their own incomparable splendour, or that homelier beauty which instantly pierces the defences of the heart. Not diffident as we, but of a nature so infinitely absent and reserved that in the legend his wife must concoct a philter to remind him of his love, he is of all the pagans the best companion for our angrier moods. An archaic and elemental serenity is upon his language and thought, rebuking our unprofitable petulance; if emotion gains him he finds utterance in those tremendous periods "where single words seem to gather out of the deep and to reverberate like thunder." As the reverberation dies away and the clouds are pierced by the sun, the world is seen in new lights through an air clear as upon rain-swept mountains.

As my reading is incessant, so also is my writing. For the happiness of man is in his fertility, and of barrenness comes the worst despair. To be happy is to have issue--children, or books written, or things beautifully wrought, or monuments of goodness to live after you, if only in the memory of some tiny hamlet of the folded hills. This is the law of life that Diotima knew, by which flower and tree, animal and man, fulfil the end of their creation; and man in nothing more surely proves his lordship than by his many-handed hold upon posterity. For the lower creation is procreant in one way, but man in many; who may have offspring not of body alone but of mind and heart, and be so redeemed from the grim dismay of childlessness. The greatest human happiness is to be fertile in every way, a thing granted rarely in the world we know; the next, perhaps, is that of the parent who gives all of himself to his family, not tilling any field beyond the charmed walls confining his desire. The author sure of his fame, the born artist, the benefactor of his kind, are also happy, seeing their offspring grow in years and in the power of making a brighter world.

But he is miserable who, aspiring to follow these, feels his force wane within him while he remains yet fatherless; or who has sons stillborn, or weakly, or dishonoured. I question whether sheer degradation into evil brings more pain to man than such sense of sterility or frustrate parentage. But it is no small part of human redemption that none need know the interminable misery. A man may have neither sons nor genius, but in the dark hour he can go out and give, if it be only a penny or a kind word, and on that foundation build a temple to receive his thanksgiving. To give of yourself is good. This is that grand agreement and oecumenical consent to which those words _quod ab omnibus quod ubique_ in deed and truth may be applied. For this reason meanness is of the deeps, and avarice groans in the lowest zone of hell. And if there are faces of blank and permanent despair upon your path, be sure that these are not masks of whole men, but of those who wilfully abstained from joy and have received the greater damnation. My children are mostly writings, poor weakly creatures dying inarticulate and unchristened, tenderly remembered by myself only, but at least no nuisance to the world. I loved them at their birth, I hold them in remembrance, though they were ever of a hectic and uncertain beauty.

The comparison of children with branches of the olive is not the mere ornament of a Bible verse, but the wisdom of one who knew both tree and child. For as children are bright creatures of swiftly changing moods, so are the olive leaves in the blue southern air. I once read of an artist who essayed to paint a group of olives and a cypress growing before them. Against their silvery leaves its dark burnished form stood finely mysterious, the contrasting grey lending it a depth of almost sable colour; all was propitious for his work. Then suddenly, the air being to all seeming quite still, the grey-green leaves began to shake and quiver, until each olive tree was like a silver bonfire, tremulous with a thousand waves of white flame flowing and following along the branches. It was a revelation and swift effluence of life, perplexing and full of charm. The brush was laid down, the moment of inspiration gone, before the capricious leaves ceased their quivering to be robed once more in grey, casting on the ground that translucent shadow which tempers the sunlight only, and does not spoil it of its gold. In the end the canvas was covered, but with a sketch far less true and beautiful than the painter's first happy vision. Even so of all our children few attain the perfection of our dreams. While we look, some influence comes upon them and they are changed, some breeze, born we know not where, stirs them to their heart of joy while we stand perplexed; innumerable laughter of leaves, a rushing and a shivering in quick answer to a mere breath, silence as swift when unperceived it dies away--these are their replies to our silent invocations. We cannot follow the swift course, but are quickened with a glad rejuvenescence, the true prize and guerdon of parentage. They may grow old or die, or bring us sorrow; it is enough that once they so lived and stirred a pride within us. Let Hedonist and idealist dispute, let one worship pleasure and another wait on the intangible joy, but in the fathering and mothering and the bringing up of young children, of the flesh, the mind, or the spirit, lies the natural happiness of men and women. It is a joy which outlasts disillusions; it rests surely upon achievement and deserts which lie ponderable in the archangel's scales. For it is certain that he who creates as best he knows best serves God, the world and himself, and what system of Ethics has conceived a more perfect rule?

All young life is instinct with such a beauty and trustfulness, that though he himself may have no part or lot in its creation, and be dumb or awkward in its presence, a man will be the brighter for having passed, if but for a moment, out of the darkness of his own course into the radiance within its orbit. To the diffident this is an especial grace. For children by some deeper intuition understand us as their parents cannot do; and when all the world is cold will often smile upon us with happy upturned faces. It is one of my consolations that the little players in the parks come running to me rather than to others with their eternal question after the exact hour of day. For I reflect that though my face grows wrinkled and drawn with years, there must yet hover something about its ugly surface which tells of a good will within. There was a time when I found the children's question importunate, and drew out my watch ungraciously; but now I feel disappointment if during their hours of play I can walk my mile without answering one of these high-pitched inquiries.

To have the confidence of children is indeed a thing of which a poor wanderer may be proud, a credential confirming his self-respect, and worthy one day to be presented at the gate of heaven. Once during one of my worst hours of desolation, when I was tramping across the fields, I found a little maid of seven picking primroses on the edge of an old orchard. For some time I stood watching, so charmed with the grace of her movements and the beauty of the spring sunlight on her golden mane, that I lost all consciousness of present trouble, and beyond her fairy form began to see vague visions of lost happiness returning. As I stood thus forgetful and looking absently before me, I suddenly felt a touch which recalled my scattered thoughts: she had come to me and put her hand in mine. I think in all my lonely life I never felt so swift a thankfulness as that which suffused me then: the memory of it is always with me, and now I never see a happy child engrossed in its little task of duty or pleasure without thinking to myself there is one of those who truly have power to remit sins. I will not repeat the fond things often written about children. Not all of them are like the infant angels of Bellini or Filippino Lippi or Carpaccio; some indeed are strident, pert, without charm or candour, not doves but little jays; but for the loveliness of those who have smiled upon me, whether rich or poor, whether wild or tended flowers, I shall ever hold the whole company dear.

Whether I read or write, or go painfully upon difficult paths of thought, like many other men whom the world dismays, I win a larger tranquillity and a clearer vision from an increased simplicity of life. I know that to use the word asceticism of one's daily practice is to incur the judgment of all those whom the world calls good fellows, whose motto is live and let live, or any other aphorism of convenient and universal remission. To them asceticism is the deterrent saintliness which renounces all joy, and with a hard thin voice condemns the leanings of mankind to reasonable indulgence. The ill-favour drawn down by ecclesiastical exaggeration upon the good Greek word {askesis}, which means nothing more than the practice of fitness, has prejudiced men against all system of conduct bold enough to include it in their terminology.

Kant's chapter on the Ascetic Exercise of Ethics is a fine defence of that training of the heart and mind which has no affinity with the morbid discipline of hair shirt and scourge. "The ascetic exercise of the monasteries," he says, "inspired by superstitious fear and the hypocritical disesteem of a man's own self, sets to work with self-reproaches, whimpering compunction and a torturing of the body. It is intended not to result in virtue but to make expiation for sins, and by self-imposed punishment the sinners expect to do penance, instead of ethically repenting." And again--"All ethical gymnastics consist therefore singly in subjugating the instincts and appetites of our physical system ... a gymnastic exercise rendering the will hardy and robust, which by the consciousness of regained freedom makes the heart glad."

This is sound doctrine, neither ungodly nor inhuman, the word of a man in whose veins the warm blood yet flowed. Few pictures of venerable age please more than that of the old philosopher of Koenigsberg drawn for us by de Quincey in one of his miscellaneous Essays. There we see Immanuel Kant, leading his tranquil sane existence, giving his friends sober entertainment, talking brightly of mundane things, practising "the hilarity which goes hand in hand with virtue." For me the very eccentricities of his daily routine have a fascination, and I read them as a devout Catholic reads many a quaint passage in the _Acta Sanctorum_. How wise was his nightly habit, as he settled himself in bed before falling asleep, to asseverate with a sigh of thankfulness that no man living was more contented and healthier than he! Here is the true asceticism, the child's glad abandonment to nature maintained and grown articulate in philosophic age.

To this beauty of plain life I cannot attain. But my own life is as far removed as may be from brilliant or luxurious pleasures, and I divide my time between the country and the town. This I do from obedience to reason rather than fashion; for while the country has my love, the city is more remedial to my peculiar pain. There the shy man may have what Lamb called the perfect and sympathetic solitude, as opposed to the "inhuman and cavern-haunting solitariness," to which his infirmity inclines. There he and those who rub shoulders with him on the pavement can "enjoy each other's want of conversation." No creature with a heart can jostle daily with his kind, but he wins some consciousness of kindly feeling. The very annoyances and constraints of propinquity are in their own way disciplinary, and insistent, uncongenial persons, like glaring red buoys with clanging bells, serve at least to keep us in the fairway of navigation. And in a city there are voices of cheerful exhortation always echoing in the higher air above the roar and the trampling, which in the interludes of coarser sound, or by our removal into some quiet court or garden, may be heard repeating their stirring watchwords of endeavour. We are told that no word spoken ever dies, but goes reverberating through space for ever. It is my fancy that only evil words escape into the outer void, which eternally engulfs their profitless message, while words of hope and helpfulness are not thus lightly sundered from the world that needs them, but hover still near above us, descending with every lull of the tumult into those ears which are strained towards them. The laden air of towns carries not the rumour of the battle only, but by the presence of these fair echoes held within it, gives back to the soul more health than ever it drew from the body. With this thought I am often consoled as I go my way through gloom and clamour and unloveliness, finding a Providence in places which else seem abandoned in the outer desolation.

Nor is the vast city to be valued only for what it gives, but for its own wonderful self, an obvious point which need not be expanded into a tedious circle. The shy will naturally draw more advantage from so rich a field of contemplation than those who seldom walk alone. In London I often map out a course of wandering which in its varied stages shall remind me of the change in progress or decay of particular arts or industries or different quarters of the town. Reading their meaning in the light of history, I make bare walls speak to me with a personal voice. Let any one but acquaint himself with the styles of ecclesiastical or domestic architecture, or of monuments of the dead, or with the history of the thoroughfares he frequents, and he will be pleasantly constrained to reflection upon those who have gone before him. As he stands in the shadow of an ancient church he will think to himself: "By this very wall Chaucer may have stood." As he walks amid the reverberating ravines which are city streets he will say: "Here along green and silent paths the Roman legionary marched when Hadrian ruled the world." When once the faculty of observation has been awakened to a permanent alertness, the desire to be widely read in history of men and their arts will become irresistible; and through the knowledge gradually amassed it will be thought a sorry chance if any ramble of wider compass yield no vision which in comeliness or deformity tells its tale of changing fortune. To appreciate human work, and the conditions under which it is born, is to exult in abounding sympathy with this man's conquest over things poor in promise, or to condole with that man's failure to do the best that in him lay.

As I walk by the strand of Thames, my fancy sees upon one flood the gay barge gliding upward to green fields, and the black hull bearing down the prisoner to the Traitors' Gate. If I go up Holborn, I remember that where this traffic now thunders John Gerard tended his Physic Garden when Elizabeth was queen. I know where Sarah Siddons lived; and where William Blake died; and my curious wanderings are now so far extended, that when I turn to the great book of London I seldom find a tedious page. The places where people strove and suffered evoke before me the forms of men and women dead but unforgotten, and if I am alone I am not aware of loneliness.

London is the central wonder, but wonderful also in spirit and suggestion are those old places which ring it round: these I often frequent at every season, and carry their portraits over my heart. Let a man once learn to know them, and his memory shall never starve; he will never forget the hour when first they yielded him up their secret. Many moments of intimate delight do I treasure in remembrance, moments when I was suddenly aware that all previous impressions were the poor gatherings of purblind eyes; but I will only tell you of one, which may suffice to show what riches lie ever open to those who roam in solitude.

It was mid-April and the close of a cloudless day. I had been to the Observatory hill at Greenwich to see the sun set over London, looking for such a transfiguration of the grey city as should reveal its line of warehouses lying along the horizon in a mist of splendour like the walls of the New Jerusalem. So I had seen it before, marvellous and refined in unearthly fire: but to-day, in a sadder mood, and hungering more deeply for the vision, I looked out to the west in vain. For the wind had set in from the east, and driven back upon the town a zone of iron-grey smoke, ragged along its upper edge like a great water blown to spray, but merging below with those gloomy and innumerable buildings. Upon this the sun, which all day had ridden in a clear air, was slowly falling, losing radiance with every minute, until as it approached that gloomy spray it was luminous no more, but a dull red orb whose light, like a flame withdrawn into the consumed heart of coals, glows for awhile beneath a gathering film of grey. In a few minutes it descended, as if sadly and of resolution, into the murky sea, where for a moment its red curves seemed to refine the smoke into translucency; but at last the dun waves gathered upon it dark and voluminous, drowning it so deeply that the clearer sky above was instantly robbed of the wonted after-glow. Some pale reflection there was in the upper heaven, ensuring a time of twilight, but no glory; and smitten with a congruous sadness, I went down to the river. But there, pacing to and fro as if upon a quarter-deck, with the water lapping upon the wall beneath, I lived one of the happy hours of life, redeemed from disappointment, and carried far into a magical world.

The flood tide, which had turned for more than an hour, was now racing down wilful for the sea, though the breeze ruffling its surface seemed to thwart and stay its eager course. And on the surface, indeed, chafed and broken into innumerable ripples, the wind triumphed; but as one looked westwards towards the city, it was clear that the sullen strength of stream and tide had the mastery. For over the broad curving reach, lit like white unburnished silver with the reflection of the pallid sky, there glided forward a line of barges each with every red sail set, and as silent as if they sallied from a besieged city. One by one they hung out their lights, the lamps swaying and casting yellow bars over the quivering water, until in perfect silence all passed down before me. Each in turn attaining the lower bend where the river sweeps northward, went about and stood for the Middlesex shore; and then for a moment the wind seemed to overcome the tide, for before the boat could win new way, lying almost broadside across the stream, the breeze held her motionless, like a tired bird on a windy day when it flies out from the shelter of the wood. It was but for a moment, and then the blunt bows glided forward towards the north bank, and another barge succeeded in the gathering gloom.

And so it was until all were passed. The departing light drew the colours from the red sails and the silvery brightness from the river; all forms became outlined in black upon what uncertain light remained. Two men put off in a boat from an anchored ship; the mingled sound of their oars and voices came with subdued tone as if out of an infinite distance. Then the whole reach lay bare and silent for a while, and only the little waves lapping upon the stone steps played an accompaniment to my dream.

The hour and the place compelled to reverie, and memory consenting to their evocative charm, I peopled the still scene with the forms of those who had swayed or shared the fortunes of this land; imperious Elizabeth and gentler Mary, the slight heroic figure with one sleeve pinned empty on the breast, and all those who, going down to their business in deep waters or returning therefrom, have saluted with melancholy or with joy these towers and this wooded hill. I thought of the lads playing beneath these trees, and so inbreathing the spirit of this place that for them there was no career but to follow the river down to ocean, and ocean himself in his circuit of the world. I thought of the veterans returned from that quest, old Argonauts of a later day, now clustering round the Hospital fires and perhaps recalling amid tales of havens and high seas the very morning when they first dropped round the bend and passed into the new world beyond. For this Thames is such an avenue and entry into marvellous life that earth can show no greater rival, none more rich in dignity or in the multitude of its merchandise. And if the flood of that merchandise shall cease, and the stream once more go lonely to the sea or carry coracles, it cannot be again as if it had never borne great ships, or swung the Admiral's galley on its tide.

It is good for an Englishman to stand here and listen to the brown waters lapping on the old walls and caulked timbers; to hear, as an under murmur, voices of Lechlade and Bablockhythe, for all intervening leagues of wood and meadow not altogether lost: before this persistence and continuity of youth to feel high thoughts stir within him and solemnize the nativity of new resolve. You cannot feel beneath your feet these old stones trodden by the great generations of your own blood and kindred, and not be moved to walk uprightly, to be approved by their shades as one not unworthy of such descent. For whether such worn stones be in the aisle of some great minster, or here, paving this narrow way for hurrying feet, the inspiration is as strong and the thankfulness not other. For this is a place of meridian, the navel of our land and empire; the wind searching its alleys has no usual voice, but as it were a deep and oceanic sound, according with old ballads and stories of the sea.

I lingered leaning upon the rail until the tide had fallen from the wall, tracing along the narrow pebbled foreshore a clear marginal line of irregular contour, now sinuous, now straight, but palely luminous like a silver tone on some enamel of old Italy, a line drawn by a master draughtsman, in its inevitable and sure perfection wholly satisfying the eye. With the dark bank it vanished towards the great city, now marked in the upper sky by a hovering brightness of light escaped beyond the smoky rampart to tell the effort of innumerable lamps beneath, all pouring their blurred and vain effulgence to the disdainful stars.