Compared with all this love, of all these lovers in all the past and all the present, surely the shining of the sun was as darkness? He closed his eyes that he might behold the greater light. And, in that surpassing radiance, he seemed to be reading the deepest secrets of eternity and to be solving the riddle at the inmost heart of the universe. He saw innumerable loves ever ascending, like golden mists, out of the love of God. He saw those innumerable loves returning into the love of God again, like rivers into the sea. And with every return of love he saw the love of God growing richer and sweeter, like a fruit ripening in the sun. It seemed as if even God himself were waxing greater and as if, in the act of creation, the Creator took as well as gave. Without creation God must still have been perfect; but even God could rise from the lower perfection to the higher. Without creation the eternal Word was like a trumpet blown on an illimitable plain: but, with creation, the Word was like that same trumpet resounding and reverberating amidst re-echoing hills. God had need of man. God was Love, a pure white ray of love, and humanity was a prism turning this way and that and breaking the whiteness into the fairest colors. All love was one. Antonio's love for Isabel, Isabel's love for Antonio, was a drop flung forth from the bottomless ocean of the love of God to shine like a gem in the sunlight. No. Not like a mere grain of spray which leaped free and sparkled for a moment and then fell back to lose its identity for ever. Rather was it like the immortal soul of a new-born babe, a something suddenly existing, a something with no past, but with an everlasting future, a something with an eternal identity which even God himself could not destroy. God would no more revoke and destroy His emanations of love than He would revoke and destroy His emanations of being. Innumerable loves would chime for ever in noblest harmony with the love of God, like brooks murmuring with the sea--_vox turbœ magnœ, vox aquaram multarum et vox tonitruorum magnorum_: "a voice of a great multitude, a voice of great waters, a voice of mighty thunderings." The monk rested awhile in this thought. He knew it was the thought of Isabel's dream. But suddenly a white light blazed in his soul. Isabel vanished as if she had never been. All the human love he had been cherishing fell from him, like a dying torch from the grasp of a man who strides forth out of a cave into the blinding light of a summer noon. Antonio was caught up into an ecstasy of the pure love of God.