nfounded earth and
heaven. Then ashes everywhere. And amid the wreck--like the smoke
pillared over Sodom--mantled in darkness as in a magnific pall which
turned to grey the blackness of the night--pity mingled with judgment in
the intense meditation in which his gaze was fixed--HE stood before me.
I fell helpless at His feet. He spoke:

'The judgment is past; dispensed to every man as though he alone were
its object. _Thy_ sin has been the love of earth. Thou hast preferred
the finite to the infinite--the fleshly joys to the spiritual. Be this
choice thy punishment. Thou art shut out from the heaven of spirit. The
earth is thine for ever.'"

"My first impulse was one of delighted gratitude. 'All the wonders--the
treasures of the natural world, are _mine_?'"

"'Thine,' the Vision replied,'if such shows suffice thee; if thou wilt
exchange eternity for the equivalent of a single rose, flung to thee
over the barrier of that Eden from which thou art for ever excluded.'"

"'Not so,' I answered. 'If the beauties of nature are thus deceptive, my
choice shall be with Art--art which imparts to nature the value of human
life. I will seek man's impress in statuary, in painting....'"

"'Obtain that,' the Vision again rebuked me, 'the one form with its
single act, the one face with its single look: the failure and the shame
of all true artists who felt the whole while they could only reproduce
the part.'"

And again the Vision expatiates on the limited nature of the earthly
existence--the limited horizon which reduces man to the condition of the
lizard pent up in a chamber in the rock--the destined shattering of the
prison wall which will quicken the stagnant sense to the impressions of
a hitherto unknown world--the spiritual hunger with which the saints,
content in their earthly prison, still hail the certainty of
deliverance.

"'Let me grasp at Mind,' I then entreated,--'whirl enraptured through
its various spheres. Yet no. I know what thou wilt say. Mind, too, is of
the earth; and all its higher inspirations proceed from another
world--are recognized as doing so by those who receive them. I will
catch no more at broken reeds. I will relinquish the world, and take
Love for my portion. I will love on, though love too may deceive me,
remembering its consolations in the past, struggling for its rewards in
the future.'"

"'AT LAST,' the Vision exclaimed, 'thou choosest LOVE. And hast thou not
seen that the mightiness of Love