revolt and inner test the
justice of Law? From sorrow we take no less and no more than from
our joys. If the one reveals to the soul the mode by which the power
overflows and fills it here, the other indicates to it the unalterable
will which checks excess and leads it on to true proportion and its
own ancestral ideal. Yet men seem for ever to fly from their destiny
of inevitable beauty; because of delay the power invites and lures no
longer but goes out into the highways with a hand of iron. We look back
cheerfully enough upon those old trials out of which we have passed; but
we have gleaned only an aftermath of wisdom, and missed the full harvest
if the will has not risen royally at the moment in unison with the
will of the Immortal, even though it comes rolled round with terror and
suffering and strikes at the heart of clay.

Through all these things, in doubt, despair, poverty, sick, feeble,
or baffled, we have yet to learn reliance. "I will not leave thee or
forsake thee" are the words of the most ancient spirit to the spark
wandering in the immensity of its own being. This high courage brings
with it a vision. It sees the true intent in all circumstance out of
which its own emerges to meet it. Before it the blackness melts into
forms of beauty, and back of all illusions is seen the old enchanter
tenderly smiling, the dark, hidden Father enveloping his children.

All things have their compensations. For what is absent here there is
always, if we seek, a nobler presence about us.

Captive, see what stars give light
In the hidden heart of clay:
At their radiance dark and bright
Fades the dreamy King of Day.

We complain of conditions, but this very imperfection it is which
urges us to arise and seek for the Isles of the Immortals. What we lack
recalls the fullness. The soul has seen a brighter day than this and a
sun which never sets. Hence the retrospect: "Thou hast been in Eden
the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius,
topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, the jasper, the sapphire,
emerald.... Thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up
and down in the midst of the stones of fire." We would point out these
radiant avenues of return; but sometimes we feel in our hearts that
we sound but cockney voices as guides amid the ancient temples, the
cyclopean crypts sanctified by the mysteries. To be intelligible we
replace the opalescen