erwoven. All the best and most beautiful flowers of
character and thought seem to me to spring up in the track of
suffering; and what is the most sorrowful of all mysteries, the mystery
of death, the ceasing to be, the relinquishing of our hopes and dreams,
the breaking of our dearest ties, becomes more solemn and awe-inspiring
the nearer we advance to it.

I do not mean that we are to go and search for unhappiness; but, on the
other hand, the only happiness worth seeking for is a happiness which
takes all these dark things into account, looks them in the face, reads
the secret of their dim eyes and set lips, dwells with them, and learns
to be tranquil in their presence.

In this mood--and it is a mood which no thoughtful man can hope or
ought to wish to escape--reading becomes less and less a searching for
instructive and impressive facts, and more and more a quest after
wisdom and truth and emotion. More and more I feel the impenetrability
of the mystery that surrounds us; the phenomena of nature, the
discoveries of science, instead of raising the veil, seem only to make
the problem more complex, more bizarre, more insoluble; the
investigation of the laws of light, of electricity, of chemical action,
of the causes of disease, the influence of heredity--all these things
may minister to our convenience and our health, but they make the mind
of God, the nature of the First Cause, an infinitely more mysterious
and inconceivable problem.

But there still remains, inside, so to speak, of these astonishing
facts, a whole range of intimate personal phenomena, of emotion, of
relationship, of mental or spiritual conceptions, such as beauty,
affection, righteousness, which seem to be an even nearer concern, even
more vital to our happiness than the vast laws of which it is possible
for men to be so unconscious, that centuries have rolled past without
their being investigated.

And thus in such a mood reading becomes a patient tracing out of human
emotion, human feeling, when confronted with the sorrows, the hopes,
the motives, the sufferings which beckon us and threaten us on every
side. One desires to know what pure and wise and high-hearted natures
have made of the problem; one desires to let the sense of beauty--that
most spiritual of all pleasures--sink deeper into the heart; one
desires to share the thoughts and hopes, the dreams and visions, in the
strength of which the human spirit has risen superior to suffering and