it is that flourishes where once your rose-trees
grew. But you must have learned to study
the stars to some purpose before you dare to
neglect your roses, and omit to fill the air
with their cultivated fragrance. You must
know your way through the trackless air, and
from thence to the pure ether; you must be
ready to lift the bar of the Golden Gate.

Cultivate, I say, and neglect nothing. Only
remember, all the while you tend and water,
that you are impudently usurping the tasks of
Nature herself. Having usurped her work,
you must carry it through until you have
reached a point when she has no power to
punish you, when you are not afraid of her,
but can with a bold front return her her own.
She laughs in her sleeve, the mighty mother,
watching you with covert, laughing eye, ready
relentlessly to cast the whole of your work
into the dust if you do but give her the chance,
if you turn idler and grow careless. The idler
is father of the madman in the sense that the
child is the father of the.man. Nature has
put her vast hand on him and crushed the
whole edifice. The gardener and his rose-trees
are alike broken and stricken by the great
storm which her movement has created; they
lie helpless till the sand is swept over them
and they are buried in a weary wilderness.
From this desert spot Nature herself will
re-create, and will use the ashes of the man
who dared to face her as indifferently as the
withered leaves of his plants. His body, soul,
and spirit are all alike claimed by her.

III

The man who is strong, who has resolved
to find the unknown path, takes with the
utmost care every step. He utters no idle word,
he does no unconsidered action, he neglects no
duty or office however homely or however
difficult. But while his eyes and hands and
feet are thus fulfilling their tasks, new eyes
and hands and feet are being born within
him. For his passionate and unceasing desire
is to go that way on which the subtile organs
only can guide him. The physical world he has
learned, and knows how to use; gradually his
power is passing on, and he recognises the
psychic world. But he has to learn this world
and know how to use it, and he dare not lose
hold of the life he is familiar with till he has
taken hold of that with which he is unfamiliar.
When he has acquired such power
with his psychic organs as the infant has with
its physical organs when it first opens its lungs,
then is the hour for the great adventu