and who
steps out of his carriage up to his carved cathedral place, shakes his
lawn ruffles over the velvet cushions, and cries out, that the whole
struggle is an accursed one, and the works of the world are evil. Many
a conscience-stricken mystic flies from it altogether, and shuts himself
out from it within convent walls (real or spiritual), whence he can only
look up to the sky, and contemplate the heaven out of which there is no
rest, and no good.

"But the earth, where our feet are, is the work of the same Power as the
immeasurable blue yonder, in which the future lies into which we would
peer. Who ordered toil as the condition of life, ordered weariness,
ordered sickness, ordered poverty, failure, success--to this man a
foremost place, to the other a nameless struggle with the crowd--to that
a shameful fall, or paralysed limb, or sudden accident--to each some
work upon the ground he stands on, until he is laid beneath it." While
they were talking, the dawn came shining through the windows of the
room, and Pen threw them open to receive the fresh morning air. "Look,
George," said he; "look and see the sun rise: he sees the labourer on
his way a-field; the work-girl plying her poor needle; the lawyer at his
desk, perhaps; the beauty smiling asleep upon her pillow of down; or the
jaded reveller reeling to bed; or the fevered patient tossing on it; or
the doctor watching by it, over the throes of the mother for the child
that is to be born into the world;--to be born and to take his part
in the suffering and struggling, the tears and laughter, the crime,
remorse, love, folly, sorrow, rest."

CHAPTER XLVI. Miss Amory's Partners

The noble Henry Foker, of whom we have lost sight for a few pages,
has been in the meanwhile occupied, as we might suppose a man of his
constancy would be, in the pursuit and indulgence of his all-absorbing
passion of love.

I wish that a few of my youthful readers who are inclined to that
amusement would take the trouble to calculate the time which is spent
in the pursuit, when they would find it to be one of the most costly
occupations in which a man can possibly indulge. What don't you
sacrifice to it, indeed, young gentlemen and young ladies of
ill-regulated minds? Many hours of your precious sleep in the first
place, in which you lie tossing and thinking about the adored object,
whence you come down late to breakfast, when noon is advancing and all
the family is long since aw