love madly, perhaps, is not wise; still, should he love madly, more wisdom will doubtless come to him than if he had always loved wisely.  It is not wisdom, but the most useless form of pride that can flourish in vacancy and inertia.  It is not enough to know what should be done, not though we can unerringly declare what saint or hero would do.  Such things a book can teach in a day.  It is not enough to intend to live a noble life and then retire to a cell, there to brood over this intention.  No wisdom thus acquired can truly guide or beautify the soul; it is of as little avail as the counsels that others can offer.  “It is in the silence that follows the storm,” says a Hindu proverb, “and not in the silence before it, that we should search for the budding flower.”

88.  The earnest wayfarer along the paths of life does but become the more deeply convinced, as his travels extend, of the beauty, the wisdom, and truth of the simplest and humblest laws of existence.  Their uniformity, the mere fact of their being so general, such matter of every day, are in themselves enough to compel his admiration.  And little by little he holds the abnormal ever less highly, and neither seeks nor desires it; for it is soon borne home to him, as he reflects on the vastness of nature, with her slow, monotonous movement, that the ridiculous pretensions our ignorance and vanity put forth are the most truly abnormal of all.  He no longer vexes the hours as they pass with prayer for strange or marvellous adventure; for these come only to such as have not yet learned to have faith in life and themselves.  He no longer awaits, with folded arms, the chance for superhuman effort; for he feels that he exists in every act that is human.  He no longer requires that death, or friendship, or love should come to him decked out with garlands illusion has woven, or escorted by omen, coincidence, presage; but they come in their bareness and simpleness, and are always sure of his welcome.  He believes that all that the weak, and the idle, and thoughtless consider sublime and exceptional, that the fall equivalent for the most heroic deed, can be found in the simple life that is bravely and wholly faced.  He no longer considers himself the chosen son of the universe; but his happiness, consciousness, peace of mind, have gained all that his pride has lost.  And, this point once attained, then will the miraculous adventures of a St. Theresa or Jean-de-la-Croix, the ecstasy of the mystics, the supernatural incidents of legendary loves, the star of an Alexander or a Napoleon—­then will all these seem the merest childish illusions compared with the healthy wisdom of a loyal, earnest man, who has no craving to soar above his fellows so as to feel what they cannot feel, but whose heart and brain find the light that they need in the unchanging feelings of all.  The truest man willnever be he who desires to be other than man.  How many there are that thus waste their lives, scouring the