our is the purgatory of
the erring; it may become the hell of the wicked, but labour is not less
the heaven of the good!"

Ardworth spoke with unusual earnestness and passion, and his idea of the
future was emblematic of his own active nature; for each of us is wisely
left to shape out, amidst the impenetrable mists, his own ideal of the
Hereafter. The warrior child of the biting North placed his Hela amid
snows, and his Himmel in the banquets of victorious war; the son of
the East, parched by relentless summer,--his hell amidst fire, and his
elysium by cooling streams; the weary peasant sighs through life for
rest, and rest awaits his vision beyond the grave; the workman of
genius,--ever ardent, ever young,--honours toil as the glorious
development of being, and springs refreshed over the abyss of the grave,
to follow, from star to star, the progress that seems to him at once
the supreme felicity and the necessary law. So be it with the fantasy of
each! Wisdom that is infallible, and love that never sleeps, watch over
the darkness, and bid darkness be, that we may dream!

"Alas!" said the young listener, "what reproof do you not convey to
those, like me, who, devoid of the power which gives results to every
toil, have little left to them in life, but to idle life away. All have
not the gift to write, or harangue, or speculate, or--"

"Friend," interrupted Ardworth, bluntly, "do not belie yourself. There
lives not a man on earth--out of a lunatic asylum--who has not in him
the power to do good. What can writers, haranguers, or speculators do
more than that? Have you ever entered a cottage, ever travelled in
a coach, ever talked with a peasant in the field, or loitered with a
mechanic at the loom, and not found that each of those men had a talent
you had not, knew some things you knew not? The most useless creature
that ever yawned at a club, or counted the vermin on his rags under the
suns of Calabria, has no excuse for want of intellect. What men want is
not talent, it is purpose,--in other words, not the power to achieve,
but the will to labour. You, Percival St. John,--you affect to despond,
lest you should not have your uses; you, with that fresh, warm heart;
you, with that pure enthusiasm for what is fresh and good; you, who can
even admire a thing like Varney, because, through the tawdry man, you
recognize art and skill, even though wasted in spoiling canvas; you, who
have only to live as you feel, in order to d