Truth; our teacher
told it us from yonder mountain, the only Holy Hill." And yet others
fall upon them and slay them, shouting, "Neither of these is Truth. She
dwells not among the precipices, but in the valley; there we have heard
her accents."

And still from cliff to cliff and along the secret vales echoes the
voice of Truth; and still upon the snow-wreathed peaks and across the
space of rolling ocean, and even among the populous streets of men,
veiled, mysterious, and changeful, her shape is seen by those who have
trained themselves or been inspired to watch and hear. But no two see
the same shape, and no two hear the same voice, since to each she wears
a different countenance, and speaks with another tongue. For Truth is
as the sand of the shore for number, and as the infinite hues of the
rainbow for variety. Yet the sand is ground out of one mother rock, and
all the colours of earth and air are born of a single sun.

So, practising the ancient rites and mysteries, and bowing himself to
the ancient law whose primeval principles every man and woman may find
graven upon the tablets of their solitary heart, Morris set himself to
find that truth, which for him was hid in the invisible soul of Stella,
the soul which he desired to behold and handle, even if the touch and
sight should slay him.

Day by day he worked, for as many hours as he could make his own, at the
details of his new experiments. These in themselves were interesting,
and promised even to be fruitful; but that was not his object, or,
at any rate, his principal object in pursuing them with such an eager
passion of research. The talk and hazardings which had passed between
himself and Stella notwithstanding, both reason and experience had
taught him already that all instruments made by the hand of man were
useless to break a way into the dwellings of the departed. A day might
come when they would enable the inhabitants of the earth to converse
with the living denizens of the most distant stars; but never, never
with the dead. He laboured because of the frame of thought his toil
brought with it, but still more that he might be alone: that he might be
able to point to his soiled hands, the shabby clothes which he wore when
working with chemicals or at the forge, the sheets of paper covered with
half-finished and maddening calculations, as an excuse why he should not
be taken out, or, worse still, dragged from his home to stay for nights,
or perhaps whole