they bring much excellent distraction: what they cannot bring is Peace. Thus their failure was twofold. Beside the pursuits already noticed, the earnest wish to render myself not more unworthy Désirée by submission to weak and selfish sorrow urged me to efforts, not without fruit occasionally, to relieve some victims of injustice or misfortune, to place some in the ways of honourable success: useful duties, fulfilled without relief, and recorded without pleasure. But that any man, though wise beyond Plato or happy beyond Cleobis, should imagine such activity can seriously lessen personal pain, or give any solution of the general mystery, was to me astonishing. For the former, it is enough to say, could the most entire selfapproval of conscience, could the life of the holiest Saint, of the most widely useful hero, if I had lived it, render Désirée loved less fondly, lost less utterly? Could these things still Rachel weeping for her children? Nothing but love ransoms or recompenses love.

That fallacy is in truth answered by stating it. But the second supposed result of action, although the answer is implicitly the same, requires a few words additional. It is indeed well that if any man be led by despair at the thought of the world's mysterious evil into vague inaction or Utopian theory, the distractions of personal duty should be prescribed as remedial. Yet as it is simply false to argue that such thought is in itself 'unpractical', so it is disingenuous to teach that any true solution lies in the voie de fait. As, in the strict sphere of reasoning, the loudest proclamation that it is God's world', the fiercest or the most winning appeals to 'Faith', form no Theodicaea, nor reply to the enquiry why, then, these things are so: thus, to those oppressed by the 'burden of the mystery', there is no practical relief to learn, even from one of the world's greatest Thinkers, that 'man is not made for

'thought, but for action', that if all men followed the right, evil would cease to be. That IF is fatal. We ask the oracle to solve a fundamental and conscience-disquieting perplexity: we are told if the perplexity did not exist, it would not exist. This, and no further, answer is conveyed by the current doctrines alluded to, whether taught by poet or by novelist, preacher or philosopher. That men rarely care to think on what too nearly concerns them, that such thought is full of pain (and there is none so unpopular as the pain of thinking), are the true reasons why an unmerited success attends these efforts to evade perplexity, and stifle enquiring: to hush the confession of an ignorance, fatal to the pride of systems: why, by the din and stir of (let me suppose) personal right action, we are so content to drown the voice of mystery, the sad oracles of earth, the groans of creation. Seldom, seldom indeed on these matters is the plain voice of conscience now suffered a hearing. There are other Indices than that of Rome, and Inquisitions not less repressive to right liberty than Dominic's.

VI But not so, not so can the obstinate questionings of nature be silenced. Like children who will not hear when one speaks to them of a mother's danger, or answer serious counsel at some moment of danger with song or toys, men bring each the work of his own hands, a model church, perhaps, or penitentiary, or mission, or healthy cottage, or well-rhymed aspiration for the 'larger 'hope', hymns of thankful happiness, and treatises of teleological perfection,- but the Sphynx puts her riddle still.

O, as the passionate Pascal cried in his despair, qu'elle dit tout ou rien! There have been happy men, the wisest of kings, and the greatest of poets were among them if not these, whom should we name happy? who felt the absolute nothingness of every solution of the universe which the universe has afforded us: who, oppressed

inly and travailing under conviction of the unutterable labour and wrong which filled all things, asked what was 'yet in this That bears the name of Life', to answer with 'vanity of vanities'. But even more, perhaps, would one justly suffer beneath the darkness of the Maker's drift, the Isis hid by the veil', more be moved to bitterness by these many rash failures to lift it, to scorn by 'the crowd's 'narrow devices to blunt care', who suffered himself beneath mysterious and irremediable calamity: to whom

ζωῆς ἀβίου μέρος ἀθρήσαντι

the gloom of the world within the heart seemed correlative to what he saw in the world without, the conflict of Eros and Anteros another phase of the war between Ormuzd and Ahriman; the loss of Désirée, a reflection of that characteristic of these latter days, which we can hardly describe as less than the obscuration or withdrawal of Providence. To this cause at least, if any blame such dark thoughts, I appeal for mitigation of censure. For every feeling of real depth appears to run into the Infinite to mirror itself not only in 'rocks and trees', but in the universal frame of things: to cast shadowy projections on the Unseen, and receive its own voice back in reverberations from the halls of Heaven. seemed to me as if love too strong and too endurant, through some mysterious relation of cause, or caprice of Destiny, fell beneath the curse which of old had visited knowledge too obstinately curious, as if the exile from Eden were renewed in rejection by Désirée.

VII In pages dedicated to human passion, dear

It

are such considerations too serious? I think not. Far from all souls impressed with the duty of thoughtfulness be that false philosophy which coarsely charts out human acts and experiences into trivial and important, transient and

eternal, heavenly and earthly; materializing nine-tenths of life, and phantomatically idealizing the remainder. There is a famous phrase in Goethe's 'Meister', where the hero, anxious to escape from home duties to some sphere of Utopian independence, to gain a new soul by emigration to a new continent, is warned to renounce such wandering with Here or nowhere is America'. With more truth I might apply the words to the unseen world. What we half personify as Providence, what we dimly divine as Heaven, is here also or nowhere. Long ago men placed Olympus or Paradise near earth, on Mount Ida, above Mount Salem, just beyond the blue, within the sun by a bold act of mythological imagination. As the laws of the material world, the conditions of space, unveiled themselves, the Heavens appeared to undergo an immeasureable recession that country must lie now, men thought, beyond the farthest distinguishable star, beyond the Milky Way, beyond the nebula in Orion. In a less physical form, this mode of belief prevails yet only too widely; and men professing systems the most apparently opposed, Catholicism and Comtism, for more reasons than I can here enumerate, separate so widely what is and what is not of earth, that they lose right lordship over either: they divide till they can no longer govern. Yet at last, I think, the primitive faith returns, purified by long rejection, and men now confess at least that the Unseen is very near us, is the other side of all we see or handle, is the hidden substratum of our own thoughts, the soul's soul. Partly on account of the reasons now suggested, partly because they illustrate what elsewhere I have named the sense of the Fundamental Antitheses of Philosophy, partly because the reaction from such thoughts to the contrasting image of the peace and that, too, now forfeited-surrounding Désirée held a conspicuous place in the annals of affection,

I have included in this book reflections which, if not alien from its scope, are at least hazardous in their own nature. But it appears to the writer the braver, he trusts even the more truly humble, course, to risk something. Better the sighs or the smiles of friends, that one really formidable verdict, than a silence of cowardice on matters so vital to life that he does not see how life can well be regulated without some consideration upon them.

VIII Turning, however, from thoughts which we are apt to approach with diffidence and leave with dogmatism, -if Passion, as I have said, partook of Infinity, the commonplaces of life, once glorified by a consecration so irradiating that even 'to sweep a room' with the thought of Désirée would, as old Herbert has it, have been something divine',-naturally now pressed on me at times with a sense of inevitable littleness, a weight heavy as 'frost' at times with a sad and almost solemn majesty. Everywhere in what I did or saw or traversed the inseparable image met me; here we had walked together, this occupation I had entered on that the fruits might be hers, that was a friend whose acquaintance had been sought or valued because he had spoken justly of Désirée, or was honoured by her praises. I could turn to nothing, but she was there also. The poets have told us of a region seven times surrounded by Lethe: but where on earth is the spot fenced and secure against the Furies of Remembrance ? This intimacy went back almost to the days 'disowned by memory', and there were few within recollection not associated with Désirée. In the life of love, every day indeed is an anniversary. Yet how far off all this seemed now, how far off!.... When restraining or endeavouring to restrain the mind's desolate errantry through these ruins of recollection and the Paradise which

N