w
waves; yet was the joy ever the same joy, the eternal joy, with tens of
thousands of changing forms. Life was a cosmic holiday.

Now I knew that life and truth were one; that life mere and pure is
in itself bliss; that where being is not bliss, it is not life, but
life-in-death. Every inspiration of the dark wind that blew where it
listed, went out a sigh of thanksgiving. At last I was! I lived, and
nothing could touch my life! My darling walked beside me, and we were on
our way home to the Father!

So much was ours ere ever the first sun rose upon our freedom: what must
not the eternal day bring with it!

We came to the fearful hollow where once had wallowed the monsters of
the earth: it was indeed, as I had beheld it in my dream, a lovely lake.
I gazed into its pellucid depths. A whirlpool had swept out the soil in
which the abortions burrowed, and at the bottom lay visible the whole
horrid brood: a dim greenish light pervaded the crystalline water, and
revealed every hideous form beneath it. Coiled in spires, folded in
layers, knotted on themselves, or "extended long and large," they
weltered in motionless heaps--shapes more fantastic in ghoulish,
blasting dismay, than ever wine-sodden brain of exhausted poet fevered
into misbeing. He who dived in the swirling Maelstrom saw none to
compare with them in horror: tentacular convolutions, tumid bulges,
glaring orbs of sepian deformity, would have looked to him innocence
beside such incarnations of hatefulness--every head the wicked
flower that, bursting from an abominable stalk, perfected its evil
significance.

Not one of them moved as we passed. But they were not dead. So long as
exist men and women of unwholesome mind, that lake will still be peopled
with loathsomenesses.

But hark the herald of the sun, the auroral wind, softly trumpeting
his approach! The master-minister of the human tabernacle is at hand!
Heaping before his prow a huge ripple-fretted wave of crimson and gold,
he rushes aloft, as if new launched from the urging hand of his maker
into the upper sea--pauses, and looks down on the world. White-raving
storm of molten metals, he is but a coal from the altar of the Father's
never-ending sacrifice to his children. See every little flower
straighten its stalk, lift up its neck, and with outstretched head
stand expectant: something more than the sun, greater than the light, is
coming, is coming--none the less surely coming that it is long upon the
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