"Oh! how my earthly education was neglected, and yours! and how I feel it now, with so much to say in words, mere words! Why, to tell you in words the little I can see, the very little--so that you could understand--would require that each of us should be the greatest poet and the greatest mathematician that ever were, rolled into one! How I pity you, Gogo--with your untrained, unskilled, innocent pen, poor scribe! having to write all this down--for you _must_--and do your poor little best, as I have done mine in telling you! You must let the heart speak, and not mind style or manner! Write _any_ how! write for the greatest need and the greatest number. "But do just try and see this, dearest, and make the best of it you can: as far as _I_ can make it out, everything everywhere seems to be an ever-deepening, ever-broadening stream that makes with inconceivable velocity for its own proper level, WHERE PERFECTION IS! ... and ever gets nearer and nearer, and never finds it, and fortunately never will! "Only that, unlike an earthly stream, and more like a fresh flowing tide up an endless, boundless, shoreless creek (if you can imagine that), the level it seeks is immeasurably higher than its source. And everywhere in it is Life, Life, Life! ever renewing and doubling itself, and ever swelling that mighty river which has no banks! "And everywhere in it like begets like, _plus_ a little better or a little worse; and the little worse finds its way into some backwater and sticks there, and finally goes to the bottom, and nobody cares. And the little better goes on bettering and bettering--not all man's folly or perverseness can hinder _that_, nor make that headlong torrent stay, or ebb, or roll backward for a moment--_c'est plus fort que nous_! ... The record goes on beating itself, the high-water-mark gets higher and higher till the highest on earth is reached that can be--and then, I suppose, the earth grows cold and the sun goes out--to be broken up into bits, and used all over again, perhaps! And betterness flies to warmer climes and higher systems, to better itself still! And so on, from better to better, from higher to higher, from warmer to warmer, and bigger to bigger--for ever and ever and ever! "But the final superlative of all, absolute all--goodness and all-highness, absolute all-wisdom, absolute omnipotence, beyond which there neither is nor can be anything more, will never be reached at all--since there are no such things; they are abstractions; besides which, attainment means rest, and rest stagnation, and stagnation an end of all! And there is no end, and never can be--no end to Time and all the things that are done in it--no end to Space and all the things that fill it, or all would come together in a heap and smash up in the middle--and there _is_ no middle!--no end, no beginning, no middle! _no middle_, Gogo! think of _that_! it is the most inconceivable thing of all!!!