It has sometimes seemed to me that matter may afford us the missing analogy: when the body dies, it sinks softly and resistlessly into the earth, and is carried on the wings of the wind, in the silent speeding fountains, to rise again in ceaseless interchange of form. [Sidenote: INDIVIDUALITY] Could it be so with life and spirit? As the fountain casts the jet high into the air over the glimmering basin, and the drops separate themselves for a prismatic instant—when their separate identity seems unquestioned—and then rejoin the parent wave, could not life and spirit slip back as it were into some vast reservoir of life, perhaps to linger there awhile, to lose by peaceful self-surrender, happy intermingling, by cool and tranquil fusion the dust, the stain, the ghastly taint of suffering and sin? I know not, but I think it may be so. But if I could affirm the other—that the spirit passes onwards through realms undreamed of, in gentle unstained communion, not only with those whom one has loved, but with all whom one ever would have loved, lost in sweet wonder at the infinite tenderness and graciousness of God—would it not in one single instant give me the peace I cannot find, and make life into a radiant antechamber leading to a vision of rapturous delight? 34 _Sep. 18, 1900._ How can I write what has befallen me? the double disaster that has cut like a knife into my life. Was one, I asked myself, the result of the other, sent to me to show that I ought to have been content with what I had, that I ought not to have stretched out my hand to the fruit that hung too high above me. I am too feeble in mind and body to do more than briefly record the incidents that have struck me down. I feel like a shipwrecked sailor who, flung on an unhospitable shore, had with infinite labour and desperate toil dragged a few necessaries out of the floating fragments of the wreck, and piled them carefully and patiently on a ledge out of the reach of the tide, only to find after a night of sudden storm the little store scattered and himself swimming faintly in a raging sea—that sea which the evening before had sunk into so sweet, so caressing a repose, and now like a grey monster aroused to sudden fury, howls and beats for leagues against the stony promontories and the barren beaches. [Sidenote: NEW FRIENDS]