and could condemn Him there. It could not, it
seemed, refuse to be called into being, but, once existent, it could
obey or not as it chose. Its joys might be clouded, its hopes
shattered, but it need not acquiesce; and this power of rebellion, of
criticism, of questioning, seemed to Hugh one of the most astonishing
and solemn things in the world. And thus to Hugh the history of the
individual, the aspirations and longings of mankind, seemed to contain
a significance, a sanctity that nothing could remove.

He did not believe that this rebellious questioning was justified, but
this did not lessen his astonishment at the fact that the human soul
could claim a right to decide, by its own intuitions, what was just and
what was unjust, and could accuse the Eternal Lord of Life of not
showing it enough of the problem for it to be able to acquiesce in the
design, as it desired to do. Hugh believed that he was justified in
holding that as Love was the strongest power in the world, the Creator
and Inspirer of that love probably represented that quality in the
supremest degree, though this was an inference only, and not supported
by all the phenomena of things. But it seemed to him the one clue
through the darkness; and this secret hope was perhaps the highest and
best thought that came to him from searching the records of humanity
and the conceptions of mortal minds.

And therefore Hugh felt that he was on the side of the individual; and
that he touched life in that relation. Literature then must be for
him, in some form or other, an attempt to quicken the individual pulse,
to augment the individual sense of significance. He must abstain from
what was probably a higher work; but he must not lose faith thereby.
He must set himself with all his might to preach a gospel of beauty to
minds which, like his own, were incapable of the larger mental sweep,
and could only hope to disentangle the essence of the moment, to refine
the personal sensation. That was the noble task of high literature, of
art, of music, of the contemplation of nature, that it could give the
mind a sense of largeness, of dim and wistful hope, of ultimate
possibilities. The star that hung in the silent heaven--it was true
that it was the creation of mighty forces, that it had a place, a
system, a centrifugal energy, a radiation of its own. That was in a
sense the message of a star; but it had a further appeal, too, to the
imaginative mind, in that it hun