hable, flower-eke, yet not too decoratively a flower; you must
have her with the stem, the thorns, the roots, and the fat bedding of
roses. In this fashion she grew, says historical fiction; thus does she
flourish now, would say the modern transcript, reading the inner as well
as exhibiting the outer.

And how may you know that you have reached to Philosophy? You touch her
skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of
sentimentalism. You are one with her when--but I would not have you a
thousand years older! Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental
route:--that very winding path, which again and again brings you round
to the point of original impetus, where you have to be unwound for
another whirl; your point of original impetus being the grossly
material, not at all the spiritual. It is most true that sentimentalism
springs from the former, merely and badly aping the latter,--fine
flower, or pinnacle flame-spire, of sensualism that it is, could it do
other? and accompanying the former it traverses tracts of desert here
and there couching in a garden, catching with one hand at fruits, with
another at colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded by an appetite,
sustained by sheer gratifications. Fiddle in harmonics as it may,
it will have these gratifications at all costs. Should none be
discoverable, at once you are at the Cave of Despair, beneath the
funereal orb of Glaucoma, in the thick midst of poniarded, slit-throat,
rope-dependant figures, placarded across the bosom Disillusioned,
Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus. That is the sentimental route to
advancement. Spirituality does not light it; evanescent dreams: are its
oil-lamps, often with wick askant in the socket.

A thousand years! You may count full many a thousand by this route
before you are one with divine Philosophy. Whereas a single flight of
brains will reach and embrace her; give you the savour of Truth, the
right use of the senses, Reality's infinite sweetness; for these things
are in philosophy; and the fiction which is the summary of actual Life,
the within and without of us, is, prose or verse, plodding or soaring,
philosophy's elect handmaiden. To such an end let us bend our aim to
work, knowing that every form of labour, even this flimsiest, as you
esteem it, should minister to growth. If in any branch of us we fail in
growth, there is, you are aware, an unfailing aboriginal democratic old
monster that waits to pull