ing grief, whose throbs
death and death only ever will still, deserted for desert or ocean your
world of fame and of fashion, how strangely that world would look! How
much eloquence would be dumb in your senatorial chambers; how many a
smile would be missing from your ball-rooms and hunting-fields; how many
a frank laugh would die off for ever from your ear; how many a
well-known face would vanish from your clubs, from your park, from your
dinner-tables, from your race-stands!

And how seldom would it be those that you had pitied who would go!--how
often would the vacant place be that place where so many seasons through
you had seen, and had envied, the gayest, the coldest, the most
light-hearted, the most cynical amongst you!

Ah! let Society be thankful that men in their bitterness do not now fly,
as of old, to monastery or to hermitage; for, did they do so, Society
would send forth her gilded cards to the wilderness.

* * *

"_Une vie manquee!_" says the world.

Is there any threnody over a death half so unutterably sad as that one
jest over a life?

"_Manquee!_"--the world has no mercy on a hand that has thrown the die
and has lost; no tolerance for the player who, holding fine cards, will
not play them by the rules of the game. "_Manquee!_" the world says,
with a polite sneer, of the lives in which it beholds no blazoned
achievement, no public success.

And yet, if it were keener of sight, it might see that those lives, not
seldom, may seem to have missed of their mark, because their aim was
high over the heads of the multitude; or because the arrow was sped by
too eager a hand in too rash a youth, and the bow lies unstrung in that
hand when matured. It might see that those lives which look so lost, so
purposeless, so barren of attainment, so devoid of object or fruition,
have sometimes nobler deeds in them and purer sacrifice than lies in
the home-range of its own narrowed vision. "_Manquee!_"--do not cast
that stone idly: how shall you tell, as you look on the course of a life
that seems to you a failure, because you do not hear its "_Io triumphe_"
on the lips of a crowd, what sweet dead dreams, what noble vain desires,
what weariness of futile longing, what conscious waste of vanished
years--nay, what silent acts of pure nobility, what secret treasures of
unfathomed love--may lie within that which seems in your sight even as a
waste land untilled, as a fire burnt out, as a harp without