be quite
comfortable in this best of all possible worlds. What then remains,
again? Look around you. There remains the poetry of beauty--oh yes,
of pure beauty, to match the newest artistic chintzes; the poetry of
artistic nirvana, of the blissful sleep of all manliness and energy, to
the faint sound (heard through dreams) of paradisiac mysticism sung to
golden lutes, or of imaginary amorous hysterics, or of symphonies in
alliteration. And this when there is so much error, so much doubt, so
much suffering, when all our forces are required to push away a corner
of the load of evil still weighing on the world: this sort of thing I
cannot take to." And Cyril fiercely plucked out a tuft of lilac-flowered
thyme, and threw it into the precipice below, as if it had been the
poetry of which he was speaking.

"Do you know, Baldwin," went on Cyril, "you have destroyed successively
all my gods; you have shown me that my Holy Grails, in whose service,
one after another I felt happy and peaceful to live, like another
Parzival, or Galahaso, are not the sacred life-giving cup brought down
by angels, but mere ordinary vessels of brittle earth or stinking
pewter, mere more or less useful, but by no means holy things; ordinary
pots and pans, barber's basins like Mambrino's helmet, or blue china
teapots (worst degradation of all) like the Cimabue-Browns'. I believed
in the religion of Nature, and you showed me that Nature was sometimes
good and sometimes bad; that she produced the very foulness, physical
and moral, which she herself chastised men for; you showed me whole
races destined inevitably to moral perversion, and then punished for it.
So I gave up Nature. Then I took up the fashionable religion of Science,
and you showed me that it was the religion of a sort of Moloch, since it
accustomed us to acquiesce in all the evil which is part and parcel of
Nature, since it made us passive investigators into wrong when we ought
to be judges. After the positive, I threw myself into the mystic--into
the religion of all manner of mysterious connections and redemptions;
you showed me that the connections did not exist, and that all attempted
sanctification of things through mysticism was an abomination, since it
could not alter evil, and taught us to think it might be good. O my poor
Holy Grails! Then I took up the religion of love; and you proceeded to
expound to me that if love was restricted to a few worthy individuals,
it meant neglect of t