ch we
call the mind! Strange that the dreams and superstitions of childhood
should cling to it with so inseparable and fond a strength! I remember,
years since, that I was affected even as I am now, to a degree which
wiser men might shrink to confess, upon gazing on a cloud exactly
similar to that which at this instant we behold. But see: that cloud has
passed over the star; and now, as it rolls away, look, the star itself
has vanished into the heavens."

"But I fear," answered Lord Ulswater, with a slight smile, "that we can
deduce no omen either from the cloud or the star: would, indeed, that
Nature were more visibly knit with our individual existence! Would that
in the heavens there were a book, and in the waves a voice, and on the
earth a token of the mysteries and enigmas of our fate!"

"And yet," said Mordaunt, slowly, as his mind gradually rose from its
dream-like oppression to its wonted and healthful tone, "yet, in truth,
we want neither sign nor omen from other worlds to teach us all that it
is the end of existence to fulfil in this; and that seems to me a far
less exalted wisdom which enables us to solve the riddles, than that
which elevates us above the chances, of the future."

"But can we be placed above those chances;--can we become independent
of that fate to which the ancients taught that even their deities were
submitted?"

"Let us not so wrong the ancients," answered Mordaunt; "their poets
taught it, not their philosophers. Would not virtue be a dream, a
mockery indeed, if it were, like the herb of the field, a thing of
blight and change, of withering and renewal, a minion of the sunbeam and
the cloud? Shall calamity deject it? Shall prosperity pollute? then let
it not be the object of our aspiration, but the byword of our contempt.
No: let us rather believe, with the great of old, that when it is based
on wisdom, it is throned above change and chance! throned above the
things of a petty and sordid world! throned above the Olympus of the
heathen! throned above the Stars which fade, and the Moon which waneth
in her course! Shall we believe less of the divinity of Virtue than
an Athenian Sage? Shall we, to whose eyes have been revealed without a
cloud the blaze and the glory of Heaven, make Virtue a slave to those
chains of earth which the Pagan subjected to her feet? But if by her we
can trample on the ills of life, are we not a hundredfold more by her
the vanquishers of death? All creation lies be