to every individuation in time--the
individual thus balancing the universe.

III

In reality, the Earth has never left the Sun; apart from him she has no
life, any more than has the branch severed from the vine. More truly it
may be said that the Sun has never left the Earth.

No prodigal can really leave the Father's house, any more than he can
leave himself; coming to himself, he feels the Father's arms about
him--they have always been there--he is newly appareled, and wears the
signet ring of native prestige; he hears the sound of familiar music and
dancing, and it may be that the young and beautiful forms mingling with
him in this festival are the riotous youths and maidens of his
far-country revels, also come to themselves and home, of whom also the
Father saith: These were dead and are alive again, they were lost and
are found. The starvation and sense of exile had been parts of a
troubled dream--a dream which had also had its ecstasy, but had come
into a consuming fever, with delirious imaginings of fresh fountains, of
shapes drawn from the memory of childhood, and of the cool touch of
kindred hands upon the brow. So near is exile to home, misery to divine
commiseration--so near are pain and death, desolation and divestiture,
to "a new creature," and to the kinship involved in all creation and
re-creation.

Distance in the cosmic order is a standing-apart, which is only another
expression of the expansion and abundance of creative life; but at every
remove its reflex is nearness, a bond of attraction, insphering and
curving, making orb and orbit. While in space this attraction is
diminished--being inversely as the square of the distance--and so there
is maintained and emphasized the appearance of suspension and isolation,
yet in time it gains preponderance, contracting sphere and orbit, aging
planets and suns, and accumulating destruction, which at the point of
annihilation becomes a new creation. This Grand Cycle, which is but a
pulsation or breath of the Eternal life, illustrates a truth which is
repeated in its least and most minutely divided moment--that birth lies
next to death, as water crystallizes at the freezing-point, and the
plant blossoms at points most remote from the source of nutrition.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

(1836-)

A poet in verse often becomes a poet in prose also, in composing novels;
although the novelist may not, and in general does not, possess the
faculty of writing poems