hing human wisdom is," said Father
Letheby, one of these dismal days of suspense, "until you come to test
it in sorrow. Now, here's a writer that gives me most intense pleasure
when I have been happy; and I say to every sentence he writes: 'How
true! How beautiful! What superb analysis of human emotion and feeling!'
But now, it's all words, words, words, and the oil of gladness is dried
up from their bare and barren rhetoric. Listen to this:--

"'A time will come, must come, when we shall be commanded by
mortality not only to cease tormenting others, but also ourselves.
A time must come, when man, even on earth, shall wipe away most of
his tears, were it only from pride. Nature, indeed, draws tears out
of the eyes, and sighs out of the breath so quickly, that the wise
man can never wholly lay aside the garb of mourning from his body;
but let his soul wear none. For if it is ever a merit to bear a
small suffering with cheerfulness, so must the calm and patient
endurance of the worst be a merit, and will only differ in being a
greater one, as the same reason, which is valid for the forgiveness
of small injuries, is equally valid for the forgiveness of the
greatest.... Then let thy spirit be lifted up in pride, and let it
contemn the tear, and that for which it falls, saying: "Thou art
much too insignificant, thou every-day life, for the
inconsolableness of an immortal,--thou tattered, misshapen,
wholesale existence!" Upon this sphere, which is rounded with the
ashes of thousands of years, amid the storms of earth, made up of
vapors, in this lamentation of a dream, it is a disgrace that the
sigh should only be dissipated together with the bosom that gives
it birth, and that the tear should not perish except with the eye
from which it flows.'"

"It sounds sweetly and rhythmically," I replied, "but it rests on human
pride, which is a poor, sandy foundation. I would rather one verse of
the 'Imitation.' But he seems to be a good man and an eloquent one."

"He apologizes for the defects of philosophy," said Father Letheby. "He
says:--

"'We must not exact of philosophy that, with one stroke of the pen,
it shall reverse the transformation of Rubens, who, with one stroke
of his brush, changed a laughing child into a weeping one. It is
enough if it change the full mourning of the soul into
half-mour