m life's
more depressing cares--an assembly of the elect, if you will--and
pronounce before them the words "beatitude, happiness, joy, felicity,
ideal." Imagine that an angel, at that very instant, were to seize and
retain, in a magic mirror or miraculous basket, the images these words
would evoke in the souls that should hear them. What would you see in
the basket or mirror? The embrace of beautiful bodies; gold, precious
stones, a palace, an ample park; the philtre of youth, strange jewels
and gauds representing vanity's dreams; and, let us admit it, prominent
far above all would be sumptuous repasts, noble wines, glittering
tables, splendid apartments. Is humanity still too near its beginning
to conceive other things? Has the hour not arrived when we might have
reasonably hoped the mirror to reflect a powerful, disinterested
intellect, a conscience at rest: a just and loving heart, a perception,
a vision capable of detecting, absorbing beauty wherever it be--the
beauty of evening, of cities, of forests and seas, no less than of
face, of a word or a smile, of an action or movement of soul? The
foreground of the magical mirror at present reflects beautiful women,
undraped; when shall we see, in their stead, the deep, great love of
two beings to whom the knowledge has come that it is only when their
thoughts and their feelings, and all that is more mysterious still than
thoughts and feelings, have blended, and day by day become more
essentially one, that the joys of the flesh are freed from the after
disquiet, and leave no bitterness behind? When shall we find, instead
of the morbid, unnatural excitement produced by too copious, oppressive
repasts, by stimulants that are the insidious agents of the very enemy
we seek to destroy--when shall we find, in their place, the contained
and deliberate gladness of a spirit that is for ever exalted because it
for ever is seeking to understand, and to love? . . . These things
have long been known, and their repetition may well seem of little
avail. And yet, we need but to have been twice or thrice in the
company of those who stand for what is best in mankind, most
intellectually, sentiently human, to realise how uncertain and groping
their search is still for the happier hours of life; to marvel at the
resemblance the unconscious happiness they look for bears to the
happiness craved by the man who has no spiritual existence; to note how
opaque, to their eyes, is the cloud w