and love are
one, the heavens are not bright enough for their thoughts, nor eternity
long enough for their deeds. Amid the shadows of life they seem to
have caught a momentary radiance from beyond the clouds; amid sorrows
and sins and all manner of weariness they are the recurring vision and
revelation of the eternal order. All the world waits on them and
rejoices in them; and the bitter knowledge of what lies before the
eager feet, waiting with passionate hope on the threshold, does not
lessen the perennial interest in that fair picture; for in youth and
love are realised the universal ideals of men. Youth and love are the
mortal synonyms of immortality; all that freshness of spirit, buoyancy
of strength, energy of hope, boundlessness of joy, completeness and
glory of life, imply, are typified in these two things, always
vanishing and yet always reappearing among men. Wearing the beautiful
masks of youth and love, the gods continually revisit the earth, and in
their luminous presence faith forever rebuilds its shattered temples.

That which makes youth and love so precious to us is the play they give
to the Imagination; indeed, the better part of them both is compounded
of Imagination. The horizons recede from their gaze because the second
sight of Imagination is theirs--that prescience which pierces the mists
which enfold us, and discerns the vaster world through which we move
for the most part with halting feet and blinded eyes. Youth knows that
it was born to life and power and exhaustless resources; love knows
that it has found and shall forever possess those beautiful ideals
which are the passion of noble natures.

Are they blind, these flower-crowned, joy-seeking figures; or are we
blind who smile through tears at their illusions? On this island there
is but one answer to that question; for do we not know that they only
who believe and trust discern the truth, and that to faith and hope
alone is true vision given? "As yet lingers the twelfth hour and the
darkness, but the time will come when it shall be light, and man will
awaken from his lofty dreams and find--his dreams all there, and that
nothing is gone save his sleep."

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Trees and Elsewhere, by
Hamilton Wright Mabie

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER THE TREES AND ELSEWHERE ***

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