ve been his own beyond the touch of any rival's hand.
Choosing to cleave to the old creeds of his race, and passing, without a
backward glance, into the paths of honour and of justice, it was thus
with him now. Verily, virtue must be her own reward, as in the Socratic
creed; for she will bring no other dower than peace of conscience in her
gift to whosoever weds her. "I have loved justice, and fled from
iniquity; wherefore here I die in exile," said Hildebrand upon his
death-bed. They will be the closing words of most lives that have
followed truth.

* * *

There are liberties sweeter than love; there are goals higher than
happiness.

Some memory of them stirred in him there, with the noiseless flow of the
lingering water at his feet, and above the quiet of the stars; the
thoughts of his youth came back to him, and his heart ached with their
longing.

Out of the salt depths of their calamity men had gathered the heroisms
of their future; out of the desert of their exile they had learned the
power to return as conquerors. The greater things within him awakened
from their lethargy; the innate strength so long untried, so long lulled
to dreamy indolence and rest, uncoiled from its prostration; the force
that would resist and, it might be, survive, slowly came upon him, with
the taunts of his foe. It was possible that there was that still in him
which might be grander and truer to the ambitions of his imaginative
childhood under adversity, than in the voluptuous sweetness of his rich
and careless life. It was possible, if--if he could once meet the fate
he shuddered from, once look at the bitterness of the life that waited
for him, and enter on its desolate and arid waste without going back to
the closed gates of his forfeited paradise to stretch his limbs within
their shadow once more ere he died.

There is more courage needed oftentimes to accept the onward flow of
existence, bitter as the waters of Marah, black and narrow as the
channel of Jordan, than there is ever needed to bow down the neck to the
sweep of the death-angel's sword.

* * *

He accepted the desolation of his life, for the sake of all beyond life,
greater than life, which looked down on him from the silence of the
night.

* * *

It was sunset in Venice,--that supreme moment when the magical flush of
light transfigures all, and wanderers whose eyes have long ached with
the greyness and t