, unwise, unworthily bestowed, a
waste, a sacrifice, a crime; yet none the less is love, alone, the one
thing that, come weal or woe, is worth the loss of every other thing;
the one supreme and perfect gift of earth, in which all common things of
daily life become transfigured and divine. And perhaps of all the many
woes that priesthoods have wrought upon humanity, none have been greater
than this false teaching, that love can ever be a sin. To the sorrow
and the harm of the world, the world's religions have all striven to
make men and women shun and deny their one angel as a peril or a shame;
but religions cannot strive against nature, and when the lovers see each
other's heaven in each other's eyes, they know the supreme truth that
one short day together is worth a lifetime's glory.

* * *

Genius is like the nautilus, all sufficient for itself in its pretty
shell, quite at home in the big ocean, with no fear from any storm. But
if a wanton stone from a boat passing by break the shell, where is the
nautilus then? Drowned; just like any common creature!

* * *

There are times when, even on the bravest temper, the ironical mockery,
the cruel despotism of trifling circumstances, that have made themselves
the masters of our lives, the hewers of our fate, must weigh with a
sense of involuntary bondage, against which to strive is useless.

The weird sisters were forms of awe and magnitude proportionate to the
woes they dealt out, to the destiny they wove. But the very littleness
of the daily chances that actually shape fate is, in its discordance and
its mockery, more truly terrible and most hideously solemn--it is the
little child's laugh at a frisking kitten which brings down the
avalanche, and lays waste the mountain side, or it is the cackle of the
startled geese that saves the Capitol.

To be the prey of Atropos was something at the least; and the grim _Deus
vult perdere_, uttered in the delirium of pain, at the least made the
maddened soul feel of some slender account in the sight of the gods and
in the will of Heaven. But we, who are the children of mere accident and
the sport of idlest opportunity, have no such consolation.

* * *

Of course they will stone you, as village bumpkins run out and stone an
odd stray bird that they have never seen before; and the more beautiful
the plumage looks, the harder rain the stones. If the bird were a
sparrow the