“It gives a man a new feeling of the preciousness of life to know keenly what it means to fail, to be like a tiny spark, struggling to maintain itself in the darkness, and finding that all it can do is not sufficient, and that it is sinking back into nothingness forever. I think that is the meaning of the wild and startled look that the creatures of the forest wear; and it is a very tragic thing indeed to realize, and makes one full of mercy. If he knows his own heart he can read the same thing in the faces of men, and he no longer even laughs at their pride and their greediness, but sees them quite infinitely wretched and pitiable. I do not speak merely of the poor and hopeless people, the hunted creatures of society; for this terror is not merely physical. It is the same imperative of life that makes conscience, and so every man knows it who has made himself a slave to his body, and sees the soul within him helpless and sinking; and every man who has sinned and sees his evil stamped upon the face of things outside him, in shapes of terror that must be forever. Strange as it may seem, I think the man who lives most rightly, the man of genius, knows the feeling most of all, because his conscience is the quickest. It is his task to live from his own heart, to take the power that is within him and wrestle with it, and build new universes from it,--to be a pioneer of the soul, so to speak, and to go where no man has ever been before; and yet all his victory is nothing to him, because he knows so well what he might have done. Every time that he shrinks, as he must shrink, from what is so hard and so high in his own vision, he knows that yet another glory is lost forever, and so it comes that he stands very near indeed to the'tears of things.'” Mr. Howard stopped again, and Helen found herself leaning forward and wondering.