"'Each morning hails a new Endeavour's birth, Each evening weeps its pitiful corpse before.' "Hardly has the freshness faded out of the morning air before the world spirit is at our side again; she is whispering in our ear; her white wooing arms are around us; her warm breath is on our cheek; there is a brief,--how brief and feeble!--attempt at resistance, and then, ah! then, we are broken and undone. And often as, with lips hot and dry, with cheeks fevered and flushed, we look back to that serene-souled self, which but a few short hours ago stood in rapt adoration under the silence of a midnight sky, and held high communion with its Creator, we can hardly bring ourselves to believe that we and it are one and the same being. Yet, in spite of the paltriness of the earth-life, in spite of the vice, and the shame, there is one element in the strife which lends dignity even to our very failures, for in our battling against the ever-present evil, and in our struggle towards the ever-unattained good, we come within sight of a possibility, higher, perhaps, than that of which even angels can conceive. The _sin and the shame are after all but human; the effort and determination to overcome them are Divine_. "Well, without some sense of difficulty to be overcome, some sense even of comparative failure, this effort and this determination could never be; and in heaven, the place of infinite progress and possibilities, there is a certain Divine discontent which I know not how to explain better to you than by calling it the heavenly counterpart of this earthly effort. "But now tell me about yourself," she said, after a moment's pause, "for I can see that you have been through sore suffering since you came here." Through sore suffering I had indeed been, and had already grown old in hell, but the lines which she had quoted from my boyish verses, and the words she had said about the "divine discontent" of heaven, had set stirring some hidden spring in my memory, and at the time she spoke I was thinking of what Robert Louis Stevenson has said about "that little beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we have all lost and mourned--the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be." She must have known what was in my thoughts, for, taking my hand in her own, she repeated some verses which she had written and sent to me on that Easter morning (a morning which must ever shine out white and fair in my memory) when she and I had knelt side by side after confirmation to take our first communion. I remember that she called them "This Only," and had headed them with the words, "Why call ye Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?" "O feeble lips that lapse from fervent prayer, To smile at sin, and lightly laugh at shame, That in the chamber loud your love declare, And in the world scarce dare to breathe His name, Whence would _ye_ call Him Lord?