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 and aim.  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, I think, to this, 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 sadder than sorrow 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 fact, 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 distills is wasted.  Let us consider how this may be.  There is a habit we nearly all have indulged in:  we often weave little stories in our minds expending love and pity upon the imaginary beings we have created.  But I have been led to think that many of these are not imaginary, that somewhere in the world beings are thinking, loving, suffering just in that way, and we merely reform and live over again in our life the story of another life.  Sometimes these faraway intimates assume so vivid a shape, they come so near with their appeal for sympathy that the pictures are unforgettable, and the more I ponder over them the more it seems to me that they often convey the actual need of some soul whose cry for comfort has gone out into the vast, perhaps to meet with an answer, perhaps to hear only silence.  I will supply an instance.  I see a child, a curious, delicate little thing, seated on the doorstep of a house.  It is an alley in some great city; there is a gloom of evening and vapour over the sky; I see the child is bending over the path; he is