yphics of the great mystery.
There are women's faces, some real, some ideal, which contain something
in them that becomes a positive element in our creed, so direct and
palpable a revelation is it of the infinite purity and love. I remember
two faces of women with wings, such as they call angels, of Fra
Angelico,--and I just now came across a print of Raphael's Santa
Apollina, with something of the same quality,--which I was sure had
their prototypes in the world above ours. No wonder the Catholics pay
their vows to the Queen of Heaven! The unpoetical side of Protestantism
is, that it has no women to be worshipped.

But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great Secret
to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces of it.
Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty of a plain
countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the lips of a woman,
not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a message for us, and
wait almost with awe to hear their accents. But this young girl has at
once the beauty of feature and the unspoken mystery of expression. Can
she tell me anything?

Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it which
I have been groping after through so many friendships that I have tired
of, and through--Hush! Is the door fast? Talking loud is a bad trick in
these curious boarding-houses.

You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind you of
and to use for a special illustration. Riding along over a rocky road,
suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing gravel changes to
a deep heavy rumble. There is a great hollow under your feet,--a huge
unsunned cavern. Deep, deep beneath you in the core of the living
rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away it stretches its winding
galleries, their roofs dripping into streams where fishes have been
swimming and spawning in the dark until their scales are white as milk
and their eyes have withered out, obsolete and useless.

So it is in life. We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces, grinding
over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--now and then
jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must ride over or round
as we best may, sometimes bringing short up against a disappointment,
but still working along with the creaking and rattling and grating
and jerking that belong to the journey of life, even in the
smoothest-rolling vehicle. Sudden