a hand, an ocean of
light and colour. The two things that lend strength to life are, in the
first place, an appreciation of its quality, a perception of its intense
and awful significance--the thought that we here hold in our hands,
if we could but piece it all together, the elements and portions of a
mighty, an overwhelming problem. The fragments of that mighty mystery
are sorrow, sin, suffering, joy, hope, life, death. Things of their
nature sharply opposed, and yet that are, doubtless, somehow and
somewhere, united and composed and reconciled. It is at this sad point
that many men and most artists stop short. They see what they love and
desire; they emphasise this and rest upon it; and when the surge of
suffering buffets them away, they drown, bewildered, struggling for
breath, complaining.

But for the true man it is otherwise. He is penetrated with the desire
that all should share his joy and be emboldened by it. It casts a cold
shadow over the sunshine, it mars the scent of the roses, it wails
across the cooing of the doves--the sense that others suffer and toil
unhelped; and still more grievous to him is the thought that, were these
duller natures set free from the galling yoke, their mirth would be evil
and hideous, they would have no inkling of the sweeter and the purer
joy. And then, if he be wise, he tries his hardest, in slow and wearied
hours, to comfort, to interpret, to explain; in much heaviness and
dejection he labours, while all the time, though he knows it not, the
sweet ripple of his thoughts spreads across the stagnant pool. He may be
flouted, contemned, insulted, but he heeds it not; while all the strands
of the great mystery, dark and bright alike, work themselves, delicately
and surely, into the picture of his life, and the picture of other lives
as well. Larger and richer grows the great design, till it is set in
some wide hall or corridor of the House of Life; and the figure of
the toil-worn knight, with armour dinted and brow dimmed with dust
and sweat, kneeling at the shrine, makes the very silence of the place
beautiful; while those that go to and fro rejoice, not in the suffering
and weariness, not in the worn face and the thin, sun-browned hands, but
in the thought that he loved all things well; that his joy was pure and
high, that his clear eyes pierced the dull mist that wreathed cold field
and dripping wood, and that, when he sank, outworn and languid after the
day's long toil, the jocu