n, as I did once, a
picture of Rossetti's in an early stage, with the face and arms of one
of his strange and mysterious figures roughly painted in in the
brightest ultramarine? Many of these fantastic scraps of colour will
disappear altogether from the eye, just lending tone to something which
is to be superimposed upon them."

I have since reflected that this makes a beautiful parable of our
lives. Some element comes into our experience, some suffering, some
anxiety, and we tend to say impatiently: "Well, whatever happens, this
at least can never appear just or merciful." But God, like a wise and
perfect artist, foresees the end in the beginning. We, who live in time
and space, can merely see the rough, crude tints flung fiercely down,
till the thing seems nothing but a frantic patchwork of angry hues; but
God sees the blending and the softening; how the soft tints of face and
hand, of river and tree, will steal over the coarse background, and
gain their strength and glory from the hidden stains. Perhaps we have
sometimes the comfort of seeing how some old and ugly experience melted
into and strengthened some soft, bright quality of heart or mind.
Staring mournfully as we do upon the tiny circumscribed space of life,
we cannot conceive how the design will work itself out; but the day
will come when we shall see it too; and perhaps the best moments of
life are those when we have a secret inkling of the process that is
going so slowly and surely forward, as the harsh lines and hues become
the gracious lineaments of some sweet face, and from the glaring patch
of hot colour is revealed the remote and shining expanse of a sunlit
sea.

May 14, 1889.

There used to be a favourite subject for scholastic disputation:
WHETHER HERCULES IS IN THE MARBLE. The image is that of the sculptor,
who sees the statue lie, so to speak, imbedded in the marble block, and
whose duty is so to carve it, neither cutting too deep or too shallow,
so that the perfect form is revealed. The idea of the disputation is
the root-idea of idealistic philosophy. That each man is, as it were, a
block of marble in which the ideal man is buried. The purpose of the
educator ought to be to cut the form out, perikoptein, as Plato has it.

What a lofty and beautiful thought! To feel about oneself that the
perfect form is there, and that the experience of life is the process
of cutting it out--a process full of pain, perhaps, as the great
splinters and fl