inging tempest-tossed among the winds of time. Look
now for your shadows. O man of formulae, is this a place for you? Have
you fitted the spirit to a single case? Alas, in the cycle of the ages
when shall such another be proposed for the judgment of man? Now when
the sun shines and the winds blow, the wood is filled with an
innumerable multitude of shadows, tumultuously tossed and changing; and
at every gust the whole carpet leaps and becomes new. Can you or your
heart say more?

Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life; and
although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had every step
of conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory, tell me what
definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from
both to age? The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is but the
shadow of a delusion. This is gone; that never truly was; and you
yourself are altered beyond recognition. Times and men and circumstances
change about your changing character, with a speed of which no earthly
hurricane affords an image. What was the best yesterday, is it still the
best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow? Will your own Past truly
guide you in your own violent and unexpected Future? And if this be
questionable, with what humble, with what hopeless eyes, should we not
watch other men driving beside us on their unknown careers, seeing with
unlike eyes, impelled by different gales, doing and suffering in another
sphere of things?

And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of scene, do
you offer me these two score words? these five bald prohibitions? For
the moral precepts are no more than five; the first four deal rather
with matters of observance than of conduct; the tenth, _Thou shall not
covet_, stands upon another basis, and shall be spoken of ere long. The
Jews, to whom they were first given, in the course of years began to
find these precepts insufficient; and made an addition of no less than
six hundred and fifty others! They hoped to make a pocket-book of
reference on morals, which should stand to life in some such relation,
say, as Hoyle stands in to the scientific game of whist. The comparison
is just, and condemns the design; for those who play by rule will never
be more than tolerable players; and you and I would like to play our
game in life to the noblest and the most divine advantage. Yet if the
Jews took a petty and huckstering view of conduct, what