“It seems an unbearable thing to me sometimes,” she went on, “the wreck of a gifted soul. A man who can be, if he chooses, as much better and happier than the rest of us as the ocean reflects more sky than a mill-pond, must also be, if he chooses, more wicked and more miserable. It takes longer to reach sea-shells than river-pebbles. I am compelled to think, also, that intellectual rank must in heaven bear some proportion to goodness. There are last and there are first that shall have changed places. As the tree falleth, there shall it lie, and with that amount of holiness of which a man leaves this life the possessor, he must start in another. I have seen great thinkers, ‘foremost men’ in science, in theology, in the arts, who, I solemnly believe, will turn aside in heaven,--and will turn humbly and heartily,--to let certain day-laborers and paupers whom I have known go up before them as kings and priests unto God.” “I believe that. But I was going to ask,--for poor creatures like your respected niece, who hasn’t a talent, nor even a single absorbing taste, for one thing above another thing,--what shall she do?” “Whatever she liketh best; something very useful, my dear, don’t be afraid, and very pleasant. Something, too, for which this life has fitted you; though you may not understand how that can be, better than did poor Heine on his ‘matrazzen-gruft,’ reading all the books that treated of his disease. ‘But what good this reading is to do me I don’t know,’ he said, ‘except that it will qualify me to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth about diseases of the spinal marrow.’” “I don’t know how many times I have thought of--I believe it was the poet Gray, who said that his idea of heaven was to lie on the sofa and read novels. That touches the lazy part of us, though.” “Yes, they will be the active, outgoing, generous elements of our nature that will be brought into use then, rather than the self-centred and dreamy ones. Though I suppose that we shall read in heaven,--being influenced to be better and nobler by good and noble teachers of the pen, not less there than here.” “O think of it! To have books, and music,--and pictures?”