But he soon discovered, what every earnest soul learns who has been baptized into a sense of things invisible, how utterly powerless and inert any mortal man is to inspire others with his own insights and convictions. With bitter discouragement and chagrin, he saw that the spiritual man must forever lift the dead weight of all the indolence and indifference and animal sensuality that surround him,—that the curse of Cassandra is upon him, forever to burn and writhe under awful visions of truths which no one around him will regard. * * * * * [Sidenote: Good wherever we seek it.] As a bee can extract pure honey from the blossoms of some plants whose leaves are poisonous, so some souls can nourish themselves only with the holier and more ethereal parts of popular belief. * * * * * [Sidenote: Naïveté.] “Blessed are the flowers of God that grow in cool solitudes, and have never been profaned by the hot sun and dust of this world.” * * * * * [Sidenote: Sorrow a preparation for love.] Never does love strike so deep and immediate a root as in a sorrowful and desolated nature; there it has nothing to dispute the soil, and soon fills it with its interlacing fibre. * * * * * [Sidenote: Sunshine of the heart.] “He is happy, like the birds,” said Agnes, “because he flies near heaven.” * * * * * [Sidenote: Dreams.] Dreams are the hushing of the bodily senses, that the eyes of the spirit may open. * * * * * [Sidenote: Lost innocence irrecoverable.] When a man has once lost that unconscious soul-purity which exists in a mind unscathed by the fires of passion, no after-tears can weep it back again. No penance, no prayer, no anguish of remorse, can give back the simplicity of a soul that has never been stained. * * * * * [Sidenote: The strongest passions.] No passions are deeper in their hold, more pervading and more vital to the whole human being, than those that make their first entrance through the higher nature, and, beginning with a religious and poetic ideality, gradually work their way through the whole fabric of the human existence. From grosser passions, whose roots lie in the senses, there is always a refuge in man’s loftier nature. He can cast them aside with contempt, and leave them as one whose lower story is flooded can remove to a higher loft, and live serenely with a purer air and wider prospect. But to love that is born of ideality, of intellectual sympathy, of harmonies of the spiritual and immortal nature, of the very poetry and purity of the soul, if it be placed where reason and religion forbid its exercise and expression, what refuge but the grave,—what hope but that wide eternity where all human barriers fall, all human relations end, and love ceases to be a crime.