t the questioning of possibilities has been
the source of all scientific knowledge. They may say that to them there
seemed no possibility; upon which will come the question--whence arose
their incapacity for seeing it? In the meantime, that the same condition
which constitutes the bliss of a child, should also be the essential
bliss of a man, is incomprehensible to him in whom the child is dead, or
so fast asleep that nothing but a trumpet of terror can awake him. That
the rules of the nursery--I mean the nursery where the true mother is
the present genius, not the hell at the top of a London house--that the
rules of the nursery over which broods a wise mother with outspread
wings of tenderness, should be the laws also of cosmic order, of a
world's well-being, of national greatness, and of all personal dignity,
may well be an old-wives'-fable to the man who dabbles at saving the
world by science, education, hygiene and other economics. There is a
knowledge that will do it, but of that he knows so little, that he will
not allow it to be a knowledge at all. Into what would he save the
world? His paradise would prove a ten times more miserable condition
than that out of which he thought to rescue it.

But any thing that gives objectivity to trouble, that lifts the cloud so
far that, if but for a moment, it shows itself a cloud, instead of being
felt an enveloping, penetrating, palsying mist--setting it where the
mind can in its turn prey upon it, can play with it, paint it, may come
to sing of it, is a great help toward what health may yet be possible
for the troubled soul. With a woman's instinct, Dorothy borrowed from
the curate a volume of a certain more attractive edition of Shakespeare
than she herself possessed, and left it in Juliet's way, so arranged
that it should open at the tragedy of Othello. She thought that, if she
could be drawn into sympathy with suffering like, but different and
apart from her own, it would take her a little out of herself, and
might lighten the pressure of her load. Now Juliet had never read a play
of Shakespeare in her life, and knew Othello only after the vulgar
interpretation, as the type, that is, of jealousy; but when, in a pause
of the vague reverie of feeling which she called thought, a touch of
ennui supervening upon suffering, she began to read the play, the
condition of her own heart afforded her the insight necessary for
descrying more truly the Othello of Shakespeare's mind. Sh