ssage for us if we
could but read it? A little way from the path I saw a group of
absolutely unknown flower-buds; they were big, pale things, looking
more like pods than flowers, growing on tall stems. I hate crushing
down meadow-grass, but I could not resist my impulse of curiosity. I
walked up to them, and just as I was going to bend down and look at
them, lo and behold, all my flowers opened before my eyes as by a
concerted signal, spread wings of the richest blue, and fluttered away
before my eyes. They were nothing more than a company of butterflies
who, tired of play, had fallen asleep together with closed wings on the
high grass-stems.

There they had sate, like folded promises, hiding their azure sheen.
Perhaps even now my hopes sit motionless and lifeless, in russet robes.
Perhaps as I draw dully near, they may spring suddenly to life, and
dance away in the sunshine, like fragments of the crystalline sky.

July 8, 1891.

I was in town last week for a few days on some necessary business,
staying with old friends. Two or three people came in to dine one
night, and afterwards, I hardly know how, I found myself talking with a
curious openness to one of the guests, a woman whom I only slightly
knew. She is a very able and cultivated woman indeed, and it was a
surprise to her friends when she lately became a Christian Scientist.
When I have met her before, I have thought her a curiously guarded
personality, appearing to live a secret and absorbing life of her own,
impenetrable, and holding up a shield of conventionality against the
world. To-night she laid down her shield, and I saw the beating of a
very pure and loving heart. The text of her talk was that we should
never allow ourselves to believe in our limitations, because they did
not really exist. I found her, to my surprise, intensely emotional,
with a passionate disbelief in and yet pity for all sorrow and
suffering. She appealed to me to take up Christian Science--"not to
read or talk about it," she said; "that is no use: it is a life, not a
theory; just accept it, and live by it, and you will find it true."

But there is one part of me that rebels against the whole idea of
Christian Science--my reason. I found, or thought I found, this woman
to be wise both in head and heart, but not wise in mind. It seems to me
that pain and sorrow and suffering are phenomena, just as real as other
phenomena; and that one does no good by denying them, but only by
a