nd it all, Hugh felt, but
what a mind! how leisurely, how fanciful, how unfathomable! For whose
pleasure were all these bright eccentric forms created? Certainly not
for the pleasure of man, for Hugh thought of the acres and acres of
wheat now rising in serried ranks in the deep country, with the poppies
or the marigolds among them, all quietly unfolding their bells of
scarlet flame, their round, sunlike faces, where no eye could see them,
except the birds that flew over. Could it be for God's own pleasure
that these flower shapes were made? they could not even see each other,
but rose in all their freshness, as by a subtle conspiracy, yet blind
to the world about them, conscious only of the sunlight and the rain,
with no imaginative knowledge, it would seem, or sympathy with their
brethren. It always filled Hugh with a sort of pity to think of the
sightless life of trees and flowers, each rising in its place, in
plain, on hill, and yet each enclosed within itself, with no
consciousness of its own beauty, and still less conscious of the beauty
of its fellows. And what was the life that animated them? Where did
it come from? Where did it pass to? Had they any sense of joy, of
sorrow? It was hard to believe that they had not. It always
distressed Hugh to see flowers gathered or boughs broken; it seemed a
hateful tyranny to treat these delicate creatures so for an hour's
pleasure. The sight of flowers picked and then thrown carelessly down
by the roadside, gave him a sense of helpless indignation. The idyllic
picture of children wandering in spring, filling their hands with
flower-heads torn from bank and copse, appeared to Hugh as only
painful. Man, from first to last, seemed to spread a ruthless
destruction around him. Hugh's windows overlooked a stream-bend much
frequented by fishermen; and it was a misery to him to see the poor
dace, that had lived so cool and merry a life in the dark pools of the
stream, poising and darting among the river-weed, hauled up struggling
to the air, to be greeted with a shout of triumph, and passed about,
dying and tortured, among the hot hands, in the thin, choking air. Was
that what God made them for? What compensation awaited them for so
horrible and shameful an end?

Hugh felt with a sigh that the mystery was almost unendurable, that God
should make, hour by hour, these curious and exquisite things, such as
flowers and fishes, and thrust them, not into a world where the