106.  Men, as a rule, sally forth from their homes seeking beauty and joy, truth and love; and are glad to be able to say to their children, on their return, that they have met nothing.  To be for ever complaining argues much pride; and those who accuse love and life are the ones who imagine that these should bestow something more than they can acquire for themselves.  Love, it is true, like all else, claims the highest possible ideal; but every ideal that conforms not with some strenuous inward, reality is nothing but falsehood—­sterile and futile, obsequious falsehood.  Two or three ideals, that lie out of our reach, will suffice to paralyse life.  It is wrong to believe that loftiness of soul is governed by the loftiness of desire or dream.  The dreams of the weak will be often more numerous, lovelier, than are those of the strong; for these dreams absorb all their energy, all their activity.  The perpetual craving for loftiness does not count in our moral advancement if it be not the shadow thrown by the life we have lived, by the firm and experienced will that has come in close kinship with man.  Then, indeed, as one places a rod at the foot of the steeple to tell of its height by the shadow, so may we lead forth this craving of ours to the midst of the plain that is lit by the sun of external reality, that thus we may tell what relation exists between the shadow thrown by the hour and the dome of eternity.

107.  It is well that a noble heart should await a great love; better still that this heart, all expectant, should cease not from loving; and that, as it loves, it should scarcely be conscious of its desire for more exquisite love.  In love as in life, expectation avails us but little; through loving we learn to love; and it is the so-called disillusions of pettier love that will, the most simply and faithfully, feed the immovable flame of the mightier love that shall come, it may be, to illumine the rest of our life.

We treat disillusions often with scantiest justice.  We conceive them of sorrowful countenance, pale and discouraged; whereas they are really the very first smiles of truth.  Why should disillusion distress you, if you are a man of honest intention, if you strive to be just, and of service; if you seek to be happy and wise?  Would you rather live on in the world of your dreams and your errors than in the world that is real?  Only too often does many a promising nature waste its most precious hours in the struggle of beautiful dream against inevitable law, whose beauty is only perceived when every vestige of strength has been sapped by the exquisite dream.  If love has deceived you, do you think that it would have been better for you all your life to regard love as something it is not, and never can be?  Would such an illusion not warp your most significant actions; would it not for many days hide from you some part of the truth that you seek?  Or if you imagine that greatness lay in your grasp, and disillusion has taken you back