e remaining, no hope
that it ever will spring into being again--would we not rather lose
riches, tranquillity, health even, and many years of our life, than
this strange faculty which none can espy, and we ourselves can scarcely
define? Not less intangible, not less elusive, is the sweetness of
tender friendship, of a dear recollection we cling to and reverence;
and countless other thoughts and feelings, that traverse no mountain,
dispel no cloud, that do not even dislodge a grain of sand by the
roadside. But these are the things that build up what is best and
happiest in us; they are we, ourselves; they are precisely what those
who have them not should envy in those who have. The more we emerge
from the animal, and approach what seems the surest ideal of our race,
the more evident does it become that these things, trifling as they
well may appear by the side of nature's stupendous laws, do yet
constitute our sole inheritance; and that, happen what may to the end
of time, they are the hearth, the centre of light, to which mankind
will draw ever more and more closely.

2

We live in a century that loves the material, but, while loving it,
conquers it, masters it, and with more passion than any preceding
period has shown; in a century that would seem consumed with desire to
comprehend matter, to penetrate, enslave it, possess it once and for
all to repletion, satiety--with the wish, it may be, to ransack its
every resource, lay bare its last secret, thereby freeing the future
from the restless search for a happiness there seemed reason once to
believe that matter contained. So, in like manner, is it necessary
first to have known the love of the flesh before the veritable love can
reveal its deep and unchanging purity. A serious reaction will
probably arise, some day, against this passion for material enjoyment;
but man will never be able to cast himself wholly free. Nor would the
attempt be wise. We are, after all, only fragments of animate matter,
and it could not be well to lose sight of the starting-point of our
race. And yet, is it right that this starting-point should enclose in
its narrow circumference all our wishes, all our happiness, the
totality of our desires? In our passage through life we meet scarcely
any who do not persist, with a kind of unreasoning obstinacy, in
throning the material within them, and there maintaining it supreme.
Gather together a number of men and women, all of them free fro