of the
strong; for these dreams absorb all their energy, all their activity.
The perpetual craving for loftiness does not count in our moral
advancement if it be not the shadow thrown by the life we have lived,
by the firm and experienced will that has come in close kinship with
man. Then, indeed, as one places a rod at the foot of the steeple to
tell of its height by the shadow, so may we lead forth this craving of
ours to the midst of the plain that is lit by the sun of external
reality, that thus we may tell what relation exists between the shadow
thrown by the hour and the dome of eternity.

107. It is well that a noble heart should await a great love; better
still that this heart, all expectant, should cease not from loving; and
that, as it loves, it should scarcely be conscious of its desire for
more exquisite love. In love as in life, expectation avails us but
little; through loving we learn to love; and it is the so-called
disillusions of pettier love that will, the most simply and faithfully,
feed the immovable flame of the mightier love that shall come, it may
be, to illumine the rest of our life.

We treat disillusions often with scantiest justice. We conceive them of
sorrowful countenance, pale and discouraged; whereas they are really
the very first smiles of truth. Why should disillusion distress you, if
you are a man of honest intention, if you strive to be just, and of
service; if you seek to be happy and wise? Would you rather live on in
the world of your dreams and your errors than in the world that is
real? Only too often does many a promising nature waste its most
precious hours in the struggle of beautiful dream against inevitable
law, whose beauty is only perceived when every vestige of strength has
been sapped by the exquisite dream. If love has deceived you, do you
think that it would have been better for you all your life to regard
love as something it is not, and never can be? Would such an illusion
not warp your most significant actions; would it not for many days hide
from you some part of the truth that you seek? Or if you imagine that
greatness lay in your grasp, and disillusion has taken you back to your
place in the second rank; have you the right, for the rest of your
life, to curse the envoy of truth? For, after all, was it not truth
your illusion was seeking, assuming it to have been sincere? We should
try to regard disillusions as mysterious, faithful friends, as
councillors none ca