light passes out of our horizon, it is hard to feel that it is not dead.  But we ought, I am sure, to remind ourselves more constantly that both the quality of beauty itself and the desirous love that it evokes are the unchangeable things; and that though they shift and fuse, ebb and flow, they are assuredly there.  “When they persecute you in one city, flee into another,” said the Saviour of men in a dim allegory.  It is true of all things; and the secret is to realise that we have no continuing city.  Of course there sometimes fall shattering blows upon us, when someone who was half the world to us, on whom we have leant and depended, whose mind and heart have cast a glow of hope and comfort upon every detail of life, steps past the veil into the unseen.  Then comes the darkest hour of struggling bewilderment; but even then we make a miserable mistake, if we withdraw into the silence of our own hearts and refuse to be comforted, priding ourselves, it may be, upon the abiding faithfulness of our love.  But to yield to that is treachery; and then, most of all, we ought to stretch out our hands to all about us and welcome every gift of love.  It is impossible not to suffer, yet we are perhaps but tenderly punished for having loved the image better than the thing it signified.  We are punished because our idolising love has rested content with the form that it has borne, and has not gone further and deeper into the love which it typified.

What we have to beware of is a timid and cautious loitering in the little experience we have ourselves selected, in the little garden we have fenced off from the plain and the wood.  And thus the old house that I loved in my pleasant youth, the good days that I spent there year by year, are an earnest of the tender care that surrounds me.  I will not regard them as past and gone; I will rather regard them as the slow sweet prelude of the great symphony; if I am now tossed upon the melancholy and broken waves of some vehement scherzo of life, the subject is but working itself out, and I will strive to apprehend it even here.  There are other movements that await me, as wonderful, as sweet.

“And now that it is all over,” said an old, wearied, and dying statesman, after a day of sad farewells, “it is not so bad after all.”  The terror, the disquietude, is not in the thing suffered, but in our own faithless hearts.  But if we look back at the past and see how portion after portion has become dear and beautiful, can we not look forward with a more steadfast tranquillity and believe that the love and beauty are all there waiting for us, though the old light seems to have been withdrawn?

XVII