f unavailing sorrow into the pit from which his brothers
had drawn the boy they hated to sell him to the Midianites. I cannot
recollect the details plainly, and little remains but a memory of
dim-lit azure and glowing scarlet. Even though the pit was quaintly
depicted as a draw-well, with a solid stone coping, the pretty
absurdity of the thought only made one love the fancy better. But the
figure of Reuben!--even through an obscuring mist of crossing leads and
window-bars and weather stains, there was a poignant agony wrought into
the pose of the figure, with its clasped hands and strained gaze.

I used to wonder, I say, what further thing it meant. For the deep
spell of art is that it holds an intenser, a wider significance beneath
its symbols than the mere figure, the mere action it displays.

What was the remorse of Reuben? It was that through his weakness, his
complaisance, he had missed his chance of protecting what was secretly
dear to him. He loved the boy, I think, or at all events he loved his
father, and would not willingly have hurt the old man. And now, even in
his moment of yielding, of temporising, the worst had happened, the
child was gone, delivered over to what baseness of usage he could not
bear to think. He himself had been a traitor to love and justice and
light; and yet, in the fruitful designs of God, that very traitorous
deed was to blossom into the hope and glory of the race; the deed
itself was to be tenderly forgiven, and it was to open up, in the
fulness of days, a prospect of greatness and prosperity to the tribe,
to fling the seed of that mighty family in soil where it was to be
infinitely enriched; it was to open the door at last to a whole troop
of great influences, marvellous events, large manifestations of God.

Even so, in a parable, the figure came insistently before me all day,
shining and fading upon the dark background of the mind.

It was at the loss of my own soul that I had connived; not at its death
indeed--I had not plotted for that--but I had betrayed myself, I saw,
year by year. I had despised the dreams and visions of the frail and
ingenuous spirit; and when it had come out trustfully to me in the
wilderness, I had let it fall into the hands of the Midianites, the
purloining band that trafficked in all things, great and small, from
the beast of the desert to the bodies and souls of men.

My soul had thus lain expiring before my eyes, and now God had taken it
away from my