away and cry, "Call me not
forth from this; I am no more a spirit if I leave my throne." But these
moods, though lit up by intuitions of the true, are too partial, they
belong too much to the twilight of the heart, they have too dreamy a
temper to serve us well in life. We would wish rather for our thoughts
a directness such as belongs to the messengers of the gods, swift,
beautiful, flashing presences bent on purposes well understood.

What we need is that this interior tenderness shall be elevated into
seership, that what in most is only yearning or blind love shall see
clearly its way and hope. To this end we have to observe more intently
the nature of the interior life. We find, indeed, that it is not a
solitude at all, but dense with multitudinous being: instead of being
alone we are in the thronged highways of existence. For our guidance
when entering here many words of warning have been uttered, laws have
been outlined, and beings full of wonder, terror, and beauty described.
Yet there is a spirit in us deeper than our intellectual being which I
think of as the Hero in man, who feels the nobility of its place in the
midst of all this, and who would fain equal the greatness of perception
with deeds as great. The weariness and sense of futility which often
falls upon the mystic after much thought is due to this, that he has
not recognized that he must be worker as well as seer, that here he has
duties demanding a more sustained endurance, just as the inner life is
so much vaster and more intense than the life he has left behind.

Now the duties which can be taken up by the soul are exactly those which
it feels most inadequate to perform when acting as an embodied being.
What shall be done to quiet the heart-cry of the world: how answer the
dumb appeal for help we so often divine below eyes that laugh? It is the
saddest of all sorrows to think that pity with no hands to heal, that
love without a voice to speak should helplessly heap their pain upon
pain while earth shall endure. But there is a truth about sorrow which I
think may make it seem not so hopeless. There are fewer barriers than we
think: there is, in truth, an inner alliance between the soul who would
fain give and the soul who is in need. Nature has well provided that not
one golden ray of all our thoughts is sped ineffective through the
dark; not one drop of the magical elixirs love distils is wasted. Let us
consider how this may be. There is a habit w