wonder.  If she had remained in the Father’s house—­like the elder brother in the Parable—­then would all that He had have been hers, in nebulous simplicity.  But now, holding her revels apart, she seems to sing her own song, and to dream her own beautiful dream, wandering, with a motion wholly her own, among the gardens of cosmic order and loveliness.  She glories in her many veils, which, though they hide from her both her source and her very self, are the media through which the invisible light is broken into multiform illusions that enrich her dream.  She beholds the Sun as a far-off, insphered being existing for her, her ministrant bridegroom; and when her face is turned away from him into the night, she beholds innumerable suns, a myriad of archangels, all witnesses of some infinitely remote and central flame—­the Spirit of all life.  Yet, in the midst of these visible images, she is absorbed in her individual dream, wherein she appears to herself to be the mother of all living.  It is proper to her destiny that she should be thus enwrapped in her own distinct action and passion, and refer to herself the appearances of a universe.  While all that is not she is what she really is,—­necessary, that is, to her full definition,—­she, on the other hand, from herself interprets all else.  This is the inevitable terrestrial idealism, peculiar to every individuation in time—­the individual thus balancing the universe.

III

In reality, the Earth has never left the Sun; apart from him she has no life, any more than has the branch severed from the vine.  More truly it may be said that the Sun has never left the Earth.

No prodigal can really leave the Father’s house, any more than he can leave himself; coming to himself, he feels the Father’s arms about him—­they have always been there—­he is newly appareled, and wears the signet ring of native prestige; he hears the sound of familiar music and dancing, and it may be that the young and beautiful forms mingling with him in this festival are the riotous youths and maidens of his far-country revels, also come to themselves and home, of whom also the Father saith:  These were dead and are alive again, they were lost and are found.  The starvation and sense of exile had been parts of a troubled dream—­a dream which had also had its ecstasy, but had come into a consuming fever, with delirious imaginings of fresh fountains, of shapes drawn from the memory of childhood, and of the cool touch of kindred hands upon the brow.  So near is exile to home, misery to divine commiseration—­so near are pain and death, desolation and divestiture, to “a new creature,” and to the kinship involved in all creation and re-creation.