soul's wings never furled!"

* * * * *

Her rejection of the "young man's pride" has raised her for an instant
above her own suffering. Flinging back his interpretation in his
face--that interpretation which had pierced her to the quick with its
intensity of vision--she has found a better one; and for a while she
rests in this. "The laws of nature": shall not that be the formula to
still her pain? . . . Not yet, not yet; the heart was numbed but for a
moment. Stung to such fresh life as it has been but now, it cries
imperiously again. The laws of nature?

"That's a new question; still replies the fact,
Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so;
We moan in acquiescence."

Only to acquiescence can we attain.

"God knows: endure his act!"

But the human loss, the human anguish. . . . Formulas touch not these,
nor does acquiescence mitigate. Tell ourselves as wisely as we may that
mutability must be--we yet discern where the woe lies. We cannot fix the
"one fair good wise thing" just as we grasped it--cannot engrave it, as
it were, on our souls. And then we die--and it is gone for ever, and we
would have sunk beneath death's wave, as we sink now, to save it--but
time washed over it ere death mercifully came. It was abolished even
while we lived: the wind had begun "so low, so low" . . . and carried
it away on its moaning voice. Change is the very essence of life; and
life may be probation for a better life--who knows? But if she could
have engraved, immutable, on her soul, the hours in which her husband
loved her. . . .

VII.--AMONG THE ROCKS

Such anguish must, at least, "change" with the rest! And now that autumn
is fully come, the loss of summer is more bearable. It is while we hope
that summer still may stay that we are tortured.

"Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth,
This autumn morning!"

She will forget the "laws of nature": she will unreflectingly watch
earth. That is best.

". . . How he sets his bones
To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet
For the ripple to run over in its mirth;
Listening the while, where on the heap of stones
The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet."

The geniality of earth! She will sink her troubled soul into the vast
tranquillity. No science, no "cosmic whole"--just this: the brown old
earth.

But soon the analogy-hunting begins: