ment because of his
trouble. He pitied himself just a little as a martyr to the truth, a
martyr the more meritorious that the truth to which he sacrificed
himself gave him no hope for the future, and for the present no shadow
of compensation beyond the satisfaction of not being deceived. It
remains a question, however, which there was no one to put to
Faber--whether he had not some amends in relief from the notion, vaguely
it may be, yet unpleasantly haunting many minds--of a Supreme Being--a
Deity--putting forth claims to obedience--an uncomfortable sort of
phantom, however imaginary, for one to have brooding above him, and
continually coming between him and the freedom of an else empty
universe. To the human soul as I have learned to know it, an empty
universe would be as an exhausted receiver to the lungs that thirst for
air; but Faber liked the idea: how he would have liked the reality
remains another thing. I suspect that what we call damnation is
something as near it as it can be made; itself it can not be, for even
the damned must live by God's life. Was it, I repeat, no compensation
for his martyrdom to his precious truth, to know that to none had he to
render an account? Was he relieved from no misty sense of a moral
consciousness judging his, and ready to enforce its rebuke--a belief
which seems to me to involve the highest idea, the noblest pledge, the
richest promise of our nature? There may be men in whose turning from
implicit to explicit denial, no such element of relief is concerned--I
can not tell; but although the structure of Paul Faber's life had in it
material of noble sort, I doubt if he was one of such.

The summer at length reigned lordly in the land. The roses were in
bloom, from the black purple to the warm white. Ah, those roses! He must
indeed be a God who invented the roses. They sank into the red hearts of
men and women, caused old men to sigh, young men to long, and women to
weep with strange ecstatic sadness. But their scent made Faber lonely
and poor, for the rose-heart would not open its leaves to him.

The winds were soft and odor-laden. The wide meadows through which
flowed the river, seemed to smite the eye with their greenness; and the
black and red and white kine bent down their sleek necks among the
marsh-marigolds and the meadow-sweet and the hundred lovely things that
border the level water-courses, and fed on the blessed grass. Along the
banks, here with nets, there with rod a