for the fields and trees so dear to me.

What a strange parable it all made! the sparkling drops so soon lost to
sight and thought alike, each with its own definite place in the
limitless mind of God, all numbered, none forgotten; each
drop,--bright, new-born, and fresh as it appeared, racing out so
light-heartedly into the sun,--yet as old, and older, than the rocks
from which it sprang! How often had those water-drops been woven into
cloud-wreaths, through what centuries they had leapt and plunged among
sea-billows, or lain cold and dark in the ocean depths, since the day
when this mass of matter that we call the earth had been cut off and
sent whirling into space, a molten drop from the fierce vortex of its
central sun! And, what is the strangest thought of all, I can sit here
myself, a tiny atom spun from drift of storms, and concourse of frail
dust, and, however dimly and faintly, depict the course of things,
trace, through some subtle faculty, the movement of the mind of God
through the aeons; and yet, though I can send my mind into the past and
the future, though I can see the things that are not and the things
that are, I am denied the least inkling of what it all signifies, what
the slow movement of the ages is all aimed at, and even what the swift
interchange of light and darkness, pain and pleasure, sickness and
health, love and hate, is meant to mean to me--whether there _is_ a
purpose and an end at all, or whether I am just allowed, for my short
space of days, to sit, a bewildered spectator, at some vast and
unintelligible drama.

Yet to-day the soft sunshine, the babbling springs, the valley brimmed
with haze, the bird's sweet song, all seem framed to assure me that God
means us well, urgently, intensely well. "My Gospel," wrote one to me
the other day, whose feet move lightly on the threshold of life, "is
the Gospel of contentment. I do not see the necessity of asking myself
uneasy and metaphysical questions about the Why and the Wherefore and
the What." The necessity? Ah, no! But if one is forced, against
one's will and hope, to go astray in the wilderness out of the way, to
find oneself lonely and hungry, one must needs pluck the bitter berries
of the place for such sustenance as one can. I doubt, indeed, whether
one is able to compel oneself into and out of certain trains of
thought. If one dislikes and dreads introspection, one will doubtless
be happier for finding something definite to do