ace and the individual. And hence it is, that, over against the eternal
solitude within us, there ever waits without us a second solitude, into
which, sooner or later, we pass with restless flight,--a solitude
vast, shadowy, and unfamiliar in its outline, but inevitable in its
reality,--haunting, bewildering, overshadowing us!

* * * * *

"Who is it that shall interpret this intricate evolution of human
footsteps, in its meaning of sorrow?--who is it that shall give us
rest?" Such is the half-conscious prayer of all these fugitives,--of
our Lady and all her children. This it is which gives meaning to the
torch-light procession on the fifth night of the Festival; but to-morrow
it shall find an answer in the Saviour Dionysus, who shall change the
flight of search into the pomp of triumph.

* * * * *

But let us pause a moment. It is Palm Sunday! We are not, indeed, in
Syria, the land of palms. Yet, even here,--lost in some far-reaching
avenue of pines, where one could hardly walk upon a summer Sunday
without such sense of joy as would move him to tears,--even here all the
movements of the earth and the heavens hint of most jubilant triumph.
Thus, the green grass rises above the dead grass at our feet; the
leaf-buds new-born upon the tree, like lotos-buds springing up from
Ethiopian marble, give token of resurrection; the trees themselves tower
heavenward; and in victorious ascension the clouds unite in the vast
procession, dissolving in exhalation at the "gates of the sun"; while
from unnumbered choirs arise songs of exultant victory from the hearts
of men to the throne of God!

But whither, in divine remembrance,--whither is it that upon this Sunday
of all Sundays the thoughts of Christendom point? Back through eighteen
hundred years to the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, followed
by the children crying, "Hosanna in the highest heavens!" Of this it is
that the processions of Nature, in the resurrections of birth and the
aerial ascension of clouds,--of this that the upward processions of our
thoughts are commemorative!

Thus was the sixth day of the Eleusinia,--when the ivy-crowned Dionysus
was borne in triumph through the mystic entrance of Eleusis, and from
the Eleusinian plains, as from our choirs to-day, ascended the jubilant
Hosannas of the countless multitude;--this was the Palm Sunday of
Greece.

Close upon the chariot-wheels of the Sav