ir, if the
sunset hue fades, it is all there none the less, both the beauty and
the love we bore it. I do not mean that the conquest is an easy one,
because our perceptions are so narrow and so finite that when the sweet
sound or the delicate light passes out of our horizon, it is hard to
feel that it is not dead. But we ought, I am sure, to remind ourselves
more constantly that both the quality of beauty itself and the desirous
love that it evokes are the unchangeable things; and that though they
shift and fuse, ebb and flow, they are assuredly there. "When they
persecute you in one city, flee into another," said the Saviour of men
in a dim allegory. It is true of all things; and the secret is to
realise that we have no continuing city. Of course there sometimes fall
shattering blows upon us, when someone who was half the world to us, on
whom we have leant and depended, whose mind and heart have cast a glow
of hope and comfort upon every detail of life, steps past the veil into
the unseen. Then comes the darkest hour of struggling bewilderment; but
even then we make a miserable mistake, if we withdraw into the silence
of our own hearts and refuse to be comforted, priding ourselves, it may
be, upon the abiding faithfulness of our love. But to yield to that is
treachery; and then, most of all, we ought to stretch out our hands to
all about us and welcome every gift of love. It is impossible not to
suffer, yet we are perhaps but tenderly punished for having loved the
image better than the thing it signified. We are punished because our
idolising love has rested content with the form that it has borne, and
has not gone further and deeper into the love which it typified.

What we have to beware of is a timid and cautious loitering in the
little experience we have ourselves selected, in the little garden we
have fenced off from the plain and the wood. And thus the old house
that I loved in my pleasant youth, the good days that I spent there
year by year, are an earnest of the tender care that surrounds me. I
will not regard them as past and gone; I will rather regard them as the
slow sweet prelude of the great symphony; if I am now tossed upon the
melancholy and broken waves of some vehement scherzo of life, the
subject is but working itself out, and I will strive to apprehend it
even here. There are other movements that await me, as wonderful, as
sweet.

"And now that it is all over," said an old, wearied, and dying
state