to your place in the second rank; have you the right, for the rest of your life, to curse the envoy of truth?  For, after all, was it not truth your illusion was seeking, assuming it to have been sincere?  We should try to regard disillusions as mysterious, faithful friends, as councillors none can corrupt, And should there be one more cruel than the rest, that for an instant prostrates you, do not murmur to yourself through your tears that life is less beautiful than you had dreamed it to be, but rather that in your dream there must have been something lacking, since real life has failed to approve.  And indeed the much-vaunted strength of the strenuous soul is built up of disillusions only, that this soul has cheerfully welcomed.  Every deception and love disappointed, every hope that has crumbled to dust, is possessed of a strength of its own that it adds to the strength of your truth; and the more disillusions there are that fall to the earth at your feet, the more surely and nobly will great reality shine on you—­even as the rays of the sun are beheld the more clearly in winter, as they pierce through the leafless branches of the trees of the forest.

108.  And if it be a great love that you seek, how can you believe that a soul shall be met with of beauty as great as you dream it to be, if you seek it with nothing but dreams?  Have you the right to expect that definite words and positive actions shall offer themselves in exchange for mere formless desire, and yearning, and vision?  Yet thus it is most of us act.  And if some fortunate chance at last accords our desire, and places us in presence of the being who is all we had dreamed her to be—­are we entitled to hope that our idle and wandering cravings shall long be in unison with her vigorous, established reality?  Our ideal will never be met with in life unless we have first achieved it within us to the fullest extent in our power.  Do you hope to discover and win for yourself a loyal, profound, inexhaustible soul, loving and quick with life, faithful and powerful, unconstrained, free:  generous, brave, and benevolent—­if you know less well than this soul what all these qualities mean?  And how should you know, if you have not loved them and lived in their midst, as this soul has loved and lived?  Most exacting of all things, unskilful, thick-sighted, is the moral beauty, perfection, or goodness that is still in the shape of desire.  If it be your one hope to meet with an ideal soul, would it not be well that you yourself should endeavour to draw nigh to your own ideal?  Be sure that by no other means will you ever obtain your desire.  And as you approach this ideal it will dawn on you more and more clearly how fortunate and wisely ordained it has been that the ideal should ever be different from what our vague hopes were expecting.  So too when the ideal takes shape, as it comes into contact with life, will it soften, expand, and lose its rigidity, incessantly growing more noble.  And then will