Call it coldness, call it indifference, call it cowardice—­the matter is not mended.  If one is cold, one does not grow hot by pretending to perspire; if one is indifferent, one does not become enthusiastic by indulging in hollow rhetoric.  If one is cowardly, one can only improve by facing a necessary danger, not by thrusting oneself into perilous situations.  To marry without love, for the sake of the discipline, is as if a dizzy man should adventure himself alone upon the Matterhorn; the rashness of proved incapacity is not courage, but a detestable snobbishness.  One must make the best of the hard problem of God, not add to its complexity, in order to increase one’s patience.  Neither men nor angels have any patience with a fool, and it is the deed of a fool to cultivate occasions of folly.  One serves best by making the most of one’s faculties, not by choosing a life where one’s disabilities have full play, in order to correct them.  I might as well tell the Pharisee, who bids me let myself go, to take to drink, in order that he may learn moral humility, or to do dishonest things for the discipline of reprobation.  I do not think so ill of God as not to believe that he is trying to help me; as the old poet said, “The Gods give to each man whatever is most appropriate to him.  Man is dearer to the Gods than to himself.”  God has sent me many gifts, both good and evil; but he has not sent me a wife, perhaps in pity for a frail creature of his hand, who might have had to bear that tedious fate!  But I know what I miss, and see that loveless self-interest is the dark bane of solitude.  One may call it a moral leprosy if one loves hard names; but no leper would choose to be a leper if he could avoid it.  Whatever happens in this dim world, we should be tender and compassionate of one another.  It is a mere stupidity, that stupidity which is of the nature of sin, to compassionate a man for being ill or poor, and not to compassionate him for being cold and lonely.  The solitary man must dwell within his own shadow, and make what sport he can; and it is the saddest of all the privileges of reasoning beings, that reason can thus debar a man from wholesome experience.  Even in the desolation of ruined Babylon the satyr calls to his fellow and the great owl rears her brood; but the narrow and shivering soul must sit in solitude, till perhaps on a day of joy he may see the background of his dark heart all alive with a tapestry of shining angels, bearing vials in their hands of the water of Life.

XII

I wonder if others experience a very peculiar sensation, which comes upon me at intervals unexpectedly and inexplicably in a certain kind of scene, and on reading a certain type of book—­I have known it from my early childhood, as far back as I can recollect anything.  It is the sensation of being quite close to some beautiful and mysterious thing which I have lost, and for which in a blind way I am searching.