f the
road_ and a regulated pace of traffic; streets, at all events, however
narrow, where each must shovel snow, sprinkle water, and sweep his
threshold. But respect for such common property cannot be genuine where
there is not a corresponding fidelity and fondness on the part of each
for his own little enclosure, his garden, and, by analogy, his
neighbour's garden also. There is little good to be got from your vague,
gregarious natures, liking or disliking merely because others like or
dislike. There cannot be much loving-kindness, let alone love (whether
for persons or things or ideas), in souls which always require company,
and prefer any to none at all. And as to good work, why, it means
_tete-a-tete_ with what you are doing, and is incompatible with the
spirit of picnics. I own to a growing suspicion of those often heroic
and saintly persons who allow their neighbours--husband, father, mother,
children--to saunter idly into the allotments which God has given them,
trampling heedlessly the delicate seedlings, or, like holiday trippers,
carving egoistic initials in growing trees not of their own planting.
And one of the unnoticed, because continuous, tragedies of existence is
surely such wanton or deliberate destruction of the individual
qualities of the soul, such sacrifice of the necessary breathing and
standing place which even the smallest requires; such grudging of the
needful solitude and separateness, alas! often to those that we love the
best. It seems highly probable that among all their absurd and
melancholy recollections of this wasteful and slatternly earth, the
denizens of the Kingdom of Heaven will look back with most astonishment
and grief on the fact of having lived, before regeneration, without a
room apiece.

In the Kingdom of Heaven every one will have a separate room for rest
and meditation; a cell perhaps, whitewashed, with a green shutter and a
white dimity curtain in the sunshine. And the cells will, of course, be
very much alike in all essentials, because most people agree about
having some sort of bed, table, chair, and so forth. But some glorified
souls will have the flowers (which Dante saw her plucking) of Leah; and
others the looking-glass of the contemplative Rachel; and there will be
ever so many other little differences, making it amusing and edifying to
pay a call upon one's brother or sister soul.

In such a state of spiritual community and privacy (so different from
our present h