irth of a great hope, held up his hands towards heaven, and cried,
'Lord Christ, give me thy peace.'

He said no more, but rose, caught up his stick, and strode forward,
thinking.

He had learned what the sentence meant; what that was of which it spoke
he had not yet learned. The peace he had once sought, the peace that lay
in the smiles and tenderness of a woman, had 'overcome him like a summer
cloud,' and had passed away. There was surely a deeper, a wider,
a grander peace for him than that, if indeed it was the same peace
wherewith the king of men regarded his approaching end, that he had left
as a heritage to his brothers. Suddenly he was aware that the earth had
begun to live again. The hum of insects arose from the heath around him;
the odour of its flowers entered his dulled sense; the wind kissed him
on the forehead; the sky domed up over his head; and the clouds veiled
the distant mountain tops like the smoke of incense ascending from the
altars of the worshipping earth. All Nature began to minister to one who
had begun to lift his head from the baptism of fire. He had thought that
Nature could never more be anything to him; and she was waiting on
him like a mother. The next moment he was offended with himself for
receiving ministrations the reaction of whose loveliness might no longer
gather around the form of Mary St. John. Every wavelet of scent,
every toss of a flower's head in the breeze, came with a sting in its
pleasure--for there was no woman to whom they belonged. Yet he could not
shut them out, for God and not woman is the heart of the universe.
Would the day ever come when the loveliness of Mary St. John, felt
and acknowledged as never before, would be even to him a joy and a
thanksgiving? If ever, then because God is the heart of all.

I do not think this mood, wherein all forms of beauty sped to his soul
as to their own needful centre, could have lasted over many miles of his
journey. But such delicate inward revelations are none the less
precious that they are evanescent. Many feelings are simply too good
to last--using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is
generally used, expressing the conviction that God is a hard father,
fond of disappointing his children, but to express the fact that
intensity and endurance cannot yet coexist in the human economy. But the
virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like
any other experience, it may be believed in, and, i