arder to speak--of
the innocent, for so they are, victims of lust and brutality in
Babylon here, whose sense of suffering is almost gone, and is
succeeded by nothing but the desire for rest; all this seems so
meaningless, so futile....

"It is one of the problems I take up and let drop--take up and let
drop a thousand times; but all sacrifice seems essentially good, and
I do not throw the enigma aside in anger; I will wait for it to be
explained to me.

"Ah, death, death, if we are enlightened enough by that time, what a
storehouse of secrets, dear secrets you will have to tell us! I
thrill all through, in moments like these, to think of it."

"Of course," he said to me once, "there are times when we can only
wait and hope; changing our posture, like a sick man, from time to
time, to win a little ease; but when we reach a fresh standpoint, a
fresh basis--which, thank God, one does from month to month--we are
inclined to say with Albert Durer, 'It could not be better
done.'"

He was very fond of the doctrine of Special Providences.

"Every now and then I have--I suppose it is common--what may be
called a run of luck in ordinary things; I get out of scrapes in a
way I don't deserve; I find letters I have mislaid; annoyances are
mysteriously shunted aside; money flows in; days of extraordinary
happiness succeed one another; little events save vast complications
of trouble, so that I long to turn round and grasp by the hand
or kiss the cheek of the sweet friend who stands at my elbow,
suggesting, ordering, providing day and night, smiling on me as
I sleep, hovering around me as I work, without a word of praise.
Guardian angels! no fable. God gives you a sudden and particular
thought, and while you are independent of circumstances you master
them as well."

But such portraiture as the above is apt to get very vague and
insipid unless one is able to convey a vivid picture of the man as he
walked, and spoke, and lived. The _sic sedebat_ in Trinity College
(Cambridge) chapel has given more people a thrill at the thought of
Bacon than ever gained one from his books. Personality, personal
characteristics, how one craves for them! To take a late instance,
how far more impressive General Gordon's little cane is, which he
twirled in his hand as he stormed redoubts and directed an action,
than a thousand pages of rhetoric about his philosophy or his views
of life.

He was now, as ever, for strangers meeting him for the fir