ss maze of human faces going day by
day through the same monotonous routine. Knowles, passing through the
restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange meanings by this
common light of the sun,--meanings such as you and I might read, if our
eyes were clear as his,--or morbid, it may be. A commonplace crowd
like this in the street without: women with cold, fastidious faces,
heavy-brained, bilious men, dapper 'prentices, draymen, prize-fighters,
negroes. Knowles looked about him as into a seething caldron, in which
the people I tell you of were atoms, where the blood of uncounted races
was fused, but not mingled,--where creeds, philosophies, centuries old,
grappled hand to hand in their death-struggle,--where innumerable aims
and beliefs and powers of intellect, smothered rights and triumphant
wrongs, warred together, struggling for victory.

Vulgar American life? He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in
its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before. People called
him a fanatic. It may be that he was one: yet the uncouth old man, sick
in soul from some gnawing pain of his own life, looked into the depths
of human loss with a mad desire to set it right. On the very faces
of those who sneered at him he found some traces of failure or pain,
something that his heart carried up to God with a loud and exceeding
bitter cry. The voice of the world, he thought, went up to heaven a
discord, unintelligible, hopeless,--the great blind world, astray since
the first ages! Was there no hope, no help?

The hot sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it shone
on open problems in the lives of these men and women who walked the
streets, problems whose end and beginning no eye could read. There were
places where it did not shine: down in the fetid cellars, in the slimy
cells of the prison yonder: what riddles of human life lay there he
dared not think of. God knows how the man groped for the light,--for any
voice to make earth and heaven clear to him.

So the hot, long day wore on, for all of them. There was another light
by which the world was seen that day, rarer than the sunshine, purer. It
fell on the dense crowds,--upon the just and the unjust. It went into
the fogs of the fetid dens from which the coarser light was barred, into
the deepest mires where a human soul could wallow, and made them clear.
It lighted the depths of the hearts whose outer pain and passion men
were keen to read in the u