mine that my
picture in these respects could not have been more accurate had I known
Hungary for a lifetime. Of its merits as a study of human nature, and an
essay on the philosophy of life, it is not my province to speak. I
merely indicate the conclusion to which, as an attempt at philosophic
analysis, it leads. It leads, although by a quite different route, to
the same conclusion as that suggested in _The Old Order Changes_ and in
_A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_--namely, that in all the higher
forms of affection a religious belief is implicit, which connects the
lovers with the All, and establishes between them and It some conscious
and veritable communion.

The hero gives expression to this conclusion thus: On the evening after
that on which the heroine had made herself wholly his the two are
together in a boat on a forest lake. She does not regard her surrender
as the subject of ordinary repentance. On the contrary, she regards it
as justified by the cruelty and neglect of her husband, and yet she is
beset by a sense that, nevertheless, she may have outraged something
which for some reason or other she ought to have held sacred. Her
companion divines this mood, and does what he can to reassure her.
"See," he says, "the depths above us, and the depths reflected under us,
holding endless space and all the endless ages, and ourselves like a
ball of thistledown floating between two eternities. From some of these
stars the arrows of light that reach us started on their vibrating way
before Eve's foot was in Eden. Where that milky light is new universes
are forming themselves. The book of their genesis yet remains to be
written. Think of the worlds forming themselves. Think of the worlds
shining, and the darkened suns and systems mute in the night of time. To
us--to us--what does it all say more than the sea says to the rainbow in
one tossed bubble of foam? And yet to us it must say something, seeing
that we are born of it, and how can we be out of tune with it, seeing
that it speaks to us now?"

The moral of this mysticism is that no affection is complete unless it
is in harmony with some cosmic will which takes cognizance of the doings
of the individual, and gives to them individually something of its own
eternity; but that, in so far as the two are at variance, the individual
must pay the price. In _A Human Document_ this price is paid
deliberately by the man, and ultimately the woman shares in it, like a
char