so doing you
gain somewhat elsewhere.

Professor Bidwell is in love and it interferes with his work. You have
the advantage of him there, no doubt. However, you lose more than you
gain. You have shattered the dream and have awakened. To what? What is
this reality in which your universe is hung? Where shine the stars of
your scientific heaven? By the beauty of your dreaming alone, Herbert,
shall you be judged and known. You dream that you have learned the
lesson, solved the problem, pierced the mystery, and become a prophet of
matter. But matter does not include spirit, so the motif of your dream
grows all confused. Your race epic omits the race. You sing the branch
and the leaf rather than the sunlit and tenebral wood. Bidwell thinks
his ordinary sort of girl a "lyric love, half angel and half bird, and
all a wonder and a wild desire." Bidwell exaggerates, perhaps, but
unless he feels this for his wife, he has no wife. Barbara obeyed the
voice of her heart. That sounds sentimental, but it is none the less a
courageous thing to do. I was inconsistent enough to be sorry because
she loved a crippled man. Bidwell and Barbara are wiser and happier than
you can be, Herbert, than you from whose hand the map of Parnassus Hill
has been filched.

Is there one state of consciousness better than another? I think yes.
Better to have long, youthful thoughts and to thrill to vibrant emotions
than to grovel sluggishly; better to hope and dream and aspire and sway
to great harmonies than to be blind and deaf and dumb--better for the
type, better for the immortality of the world's soul. This to me is a
vital thought, therefore life or death is in the issue. For the rest I
know not. By the glimmer of light lent me, I can but guess greatness and
descry vagueness. You go further and would touch the phantasmagorial
veil. "Right!" I say, and I pray, "Godspeed." But there must be
intensity. Are you thrilled? Do you stretch out your arms and dream the
beauty? It is only when you gaze into a reality empty of the voices of
life that I would wake you to bid you dream better.

Well, Herbert, I have quarrelled with you and shall to the end, I
promise. I wish I could take you away, hide you from your Hester's
sight, and pour my poetic spleen out on you. Oh, I shall torment you
into reason and passion! Whatever you may choose to be, you are my son.
I must take you and keep you as you are, of course, but I choose to tell
the truth to you though I do