ur eyes were clear as his,--or morbid, it may be, you
think? A commonplace crowd like this in the street without: women with
cold, fastidious faces, heavy-brained, bilious men, dapper 'prentices,
draymen, prize-fighters, negroes. Knowles looked about him as into a
seething caldron, in which the people I tell you of were atoms, where
the blood of uncounted races was fused, but not mingled,--where creeds,
philosophies, centuries old, grappled hand to hand in their
death-struggle,--where innumerable aims and beliefs and powers of
intellect, smothered rights and triumphant wrongs, warred together,
struggling for victory.

Vulgar American life? He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in
its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before. People called
him a fanatic. It may be that he was one: yet the uncouth old man,
sick in soul from some pain that I dare not tell you of; in his own
life, looked into the depths of human loss with a mad desire to set it
right. On the very faces of those who sneered at him he found some
trace of failure, something that his heart carried up to God with a
loud and exceeding bitter cry. The voice of the world, he thought,
went up to heaven a discord, unintelligible, hopeless,--the great blind
world, astray since the first ages! Was there no hope, no help?

The sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it shone on
open problems in the lives of these men and women, of these dogs and
horses who walked the streets, problems whose end and beginning no eye
could read. There were places where it did not shine: down in the
fetid cellars, in the slimy cells of the prison yonder: what riddles of
life lay there he dared not think of. God knows how the man groped for
the light,--for any voice to make earth and heaven clear to him.

There was another light by which the world was seen that day, rarer
than the sunshine, and purer. It fell on the dense crowds,--upon the
just and the unjust. It went into the fogs of the fetid dens from
which the coarser light was barred, into the deepest mires of body
where a soul could wallow, and made them clear. It lighted the depths
of the hearts whose outer pain and passion men were keen to read in the
unpitying sunshine, and bared in those depths the feeble gropings for
the right, the loving hope, the unuttered prayer. No kind thought, no
pure desire, no weakest faith in a God and heaven somewhere, could be
so smothered under guilt t