e men see the true values of life, to appreciate what is beautiful
and tender in simple lives and homely relationships. The teaching of
Christ seems to me to be uniquely and essentially poetical, and to
point to the fact that the up-lifting of the human heart in admiration,
hope, and love, is the cure for some, at least, of our manifold ills.
That is my own theory of life, and I do not see that it is effeminate,
or even unpractical; and it is a mere caricature of it to call it
Epicurean. What does complicate life is the feeble acceptance of
conventional views, the doing of things, not because one hopes for
happiness out of them, not even because one likes them, but because one
sees other people doing them. Even in the most sheltered existence,
like my own, there are plenty of things which provide a bracing tonic
against self-satisfaction. There are the criticism and disapproval of
others, contempt, hostility; there are illness, and sorrow, and the
fear of death. No one of a sensitive nature can hope to live an
untroubled life; but to court unhappiness for the sake of its tonic
qualities seems to me no more reasonable than to refuse an anaesthetic
on the ground that it is interfering with natural processes._

"_I don't know that I expect to convert you; but at least I am glad to
make my position clear. I don't assume that I am in the right. I only
know that I am trying to do what appears to me to be right, trying to
simplify the issues of life, to unravel the tangle in which so many
people seem to me to acquiesce helplessly and timidly._"

XXXVI

The Mill--The Stream's Pilgrimage

There were days, of course, when Hugh's reflections took an
irrepressibly optimistic turn. Such was a bright day in the late
summer, when the sun shone with a temperate clearness, and big white
clouds, like fragments torn from some aerial pack of cotton-wool, moved
blithely in the sky. Hugh rode--he was staying at his mother's
house--to a little village perched astride on a great ridge. He
diverged from the road to visit the ancient church, built of massive
stone and roofed with big stone-tiles; up there, swept by strong winds,
splashed by fierce rains, it had grown to look like a crag rather than
a building. By the side of it ran a little, steep, narrow lane, which
he had never explored; he rode cautiously down the stony track, among
thick hazel copses; occasionally, through a gap, he had a view of a
great valley, all wi