ing in them?"

"On the contrary, it seems to me that enjoying a thing is only another
word for believing in it. If I thought the sweetest air on the violin
had no truth in it, I could not listen to it a moment longer."

"Of course the air has all the truth it pretends to--the truth, that is,
of the relations of sounds and of intervals--also, of course, the truth
of its relation as a whole to that creative something in the human mind
which gave birth to it."

"That is not all it pretends. It pretends that the something it gives
birth to in the human mind is also a true thing."

"Is there not then another way also, in which the violin may be said to
be true? Its tone throughout is of suffering: does it not mourn that
neither what gives rise to it, nor what it gives rise to, is any thing
but a lovely vapor--the phantom of an existence not to be lived, only to
be dreamed? Does it not mourn that a man, though necessarily in harmony
with the laws under which he lives, yet can not be sufficiently
conscious of that harmony to keep him from straining after his dream?"

"Ah!" said Miss Meredith, "then there is strife in the kingdom, and it
can not stand!"

"There is strife in the kingdom, and it can not stand," said the doctor,
with mingled assent and assertion. "Hence it is forever falling."

"But it is forever renewed," she objected.

"With what renewal?" rejoined Faber. "What return is there from the jaws
of death? The individual is gone. A new consciousness is not a renewal
of consciousness."

She looked at him keenly.

"It is hard, is it not?" she said.

"I will not deny that in certain moods it looks so," he answered.

She did not perceive his drift, and was feeling after it.

"Surely," she said, "the thing that ought to be, is the thing that must
be."

"How can we tell that?" he returned. "What do we see like it in nature?
Whatever lives and thrives--animal or vegetable--or human--it is all
one--every thing that lives and thrives, is forever living and thriving
on the loss, the defeat, the death of another. There is no unity save
absolutely by means of destruction. Destruction is indeed the very
center and framework of the sole existing unity. I will not, therefore,
as some do, call Nature cruel: what right have I to complain? Nature can
not help it. She is no more to blame for bringing me forth, than I am to
blame for being brought forth. Ought is merely the reflex of like. We
call ourselves the highest i