ause, my soul," of what we suffer.

"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art!
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores--"

This desperate, sensuous pain which makes us cry out to the
"midnight" that we might "cease upon it," need not harden our hearts
before we pass hence. The "gathering swallows twittering in the
sky" of our little interludes of peace may still attune us to some
strange, sad thankfulness that we have been born into life, even
though life turned out to mean _this!_

And the vibrating, stricken nerves of our too great devotion may
have at least the balm of feeling that they have not languished
untouched by the fingers that thrill while they slay. After all, "we
have lived"; we also; and we would not "change places" with those
"happy innocents" who have never known the madness of what it
may be to have been born a son of man!

But let none be deluded. The tragic life upon earth is not the life of
the spirit, but the life of the senses. The senses are the aching doors
to the greatest mystery of all, the mystery of our tyranny over one
another. Does anyone think that that love is greater, more real, more
poignant, which can stand over the dead body of its One-of-all, and
dream of encounters and reconciliations, in other worlds? It is not so!
What we have loved is cold, cold and dead, and has become _that
thing_ we scarcely recognise. Can any vague, spiritual reunion make
up for the loss of the little gestures, the little touches, _the little
ways,_ we shall never through all eternity know again? Ah! those
reluctances and hesitations, over now, quite over now! Ah! those
fretful pleadings, those strange withdrawals, those unheeded protests;
nothing, less than nothing, and mere memories! When the life of the
senses invades the affections of the heart--then, then, mon enfant,
comes the pinch and the sting!

And this is what happens with such doomed sensualists as Keats was.
What tortured him in death was the thought that he must leave his
darling--and the actual look, touch, air, ways and presence of her,
forever. "Vain," as that inspired Lover, Emily Bronte, cries, "vain,
unutterably vain, are 'all the creeds' that would console!" Tired of
hearing "simple truth miscalled simplicity"; tired of all