tant in the light of the sun till
the passing bird absorbs its existence.

21

Let me suppose that a neighbour of mine, whom I know very intimately,
whose regular habits and inoffensive manners have won my esteem, should
successively lose his wife in a railway accident, one son at sea,
another in a fire, the third and last by disease. I should, of course,
be painfully shocked and grieved; but still it would not occur to me to
attribute this series of disasters to a divine vengeance or an
invisible justice, to a strange, ill-starred predestination, or an
active, persistent, inevitable fatality. My thoughts would fly to the
myriad unfortunate hazards of life; I should be appalled at the
frightful coincidence of calamity; but in me there would be no
suggestion of a superhuman will that had hurled the train over the
precipice, steered the ship on to rocks, or kindled the flames; I
should hold it incredible that such monstrous efforts could have been
put forth with the sole object of inflicting punishment and despair
upon a poor wretch, because of some error he might have committed--one
of those grave human errors which yet are so petty in face of the
universe; an error which perhaps had not issued from either his heart
or his brain, and had stirred not one blade of grass on the earth's
whole surface.

22

But he, this neighbour of mine, on whom these terrible blows have
successively fallen, like so many lightning-flashes on a black night of
storm--will he think as I do; will these catastrophes seem natural to
him, and ordinary, and susceptible of explanation? Will not the words
destiny, fortune, hazard, ill-luck, fatality, star--the word
Providence, perhaps--assume in his mind a significance they never have
assumed before? Will not the light beneath which he questions his
consciousness be a different light from my own, will he not feel round
his life an influence, a power, a kind of evil intention, that are
imperceptible to me? And who is right, he or I? Which of us two sees
more clearly, and further? Do truths that in calmer times lie hidden
float to the surface in hours of trouble; and which is the moment we
should choose to establish the meaning of life?

The "interpreter of life," as a rule, selects the troubled hours. He
places himself, and us, in the soul-state of his victims. He shows
their misfortunes to us in perspective; and so sharply, concretely,
that we have for the moment the illusion of a