And thus to Hugh the history of the individual, the aspirations and longings of mankind, seemed to contain a significance, a sanctity that nothing could remove. He did not believe that this rebellious questioning was justified, but this did not lessen his astonishment at the fact that the human soul could claim a right to decide, by its own intuitions, what was just and what was unjust, and could accuse the Eternal Lord of Life of not showing it enough of the problem for it to be able to acquiesce in the design, as it desired to do. Hugh believed that he was justified in holding that as Love was the strongest power in the world, the Creator and Inspirer of that love probably represented that quality in the supremest degree, though this was an inference only, and not supported by all the phenomena of things. But it seemed to him the one clue through the darkness; and this secret hope was perhaps the highest and best thought that came to him from searching the records of humanity and the conceptions of mortal minds. And therefore Hugh felt that he was on the side of the individual; and that he touched life in that relation. Literature then must be for him, in some form or other, an attempt to quicken the individual pulse, to augment the individual sense of significance. He must abstain from what was probably a higher work; but he must not lose faith thereby. He must set himself with all his might to preach a gospel of beauty to minds which, like his own, were incapable of the larger mental sweep, and could only hope to disentangle the essence of the moment, to refine the personal sensation. That was the noble task of high literature, of art, of music, of the contemplation of nature, that it could give the mind a sense of largeness, of dim and wistful hope, of ultimate possibilities. The star that hung in the silent heaven--it was true that it was the creation of mighty forces, that it had a place, a system, a centrifugal energy, a radiation of its own. That was in a sense the message of a star; but it had a further appeal, too, to the imaginative mind, in that it hung a glowing point of ageless light, infinitely remote, intolerably mysterious, a symbol of all the lustrous energies of the aspiring soul. And in one sense indeed the pure imagination could invest such vast creatures of God with even a finer, freer charm than scientific apprehension. Science could indicate its bulk, its motions, its distance, even analyse its very bones; but it could do no more; while the spirit could glide, as in an aerial chariot, through the darkness of the impalpable abyss, draw nearer and nearer in thought to the vast luminary, see unscathed its prodigious vents spouting flame and smoke, and hear the roar of its furnaces; or softly alight upon fields of dark stones, and watch with awe the imagined progress of forms intolerably huge, swollen as with the bigness of nightmare. Here was the strange contrast, that science was