How miserable is that image, and how unfit to use! Death is still and cool and sweet. There is nothing in it that pierces like a sword, that burns like fire, that rends and tears like the turning wheels. O life, O pain, O terrible name of God, in which is all succour and all torment! What are pangs and tortures to that, which ever increases in its awful power, and has no limit, nor any alleviation, but whenever it is spoken penetrates through and through the miserable soul? O God, whom once I called my Father! O Thou who gavest me being, against whom I have fought, whom I fight to the end, shall there never be anything but anguish in the sound of Thy great name? When I returned to such command of myself as one can have who has been transfixed by that sword of fire, the master stood by me still. He had not fallen like me, but his face was drawn with anguish and sorrow like the face of my friend who had been with me in the lazar-house, who had disappeared on the dark mountains. And as I looked at him, terror seized hold upon me, and a desire to flee and save myself, that I might not be drawn after him by the longing that was in his eyes. The master gave me his hand to help me to rise, and it trembled, but not like mine. ‘Sir,’ I cried, ‘have not we enough to bear? Is it for hatred, is it for vengeance, that you speak that name!’ ‘O friend,’ he said, ‘neither for hatred nor revenge. It is like a fire in my veins: if one could find Him again----!’ ‘You, who are as a god--who can make and destroy--you, who could shake His throne!’ He put up his hand. ‘I who am His creature, even here--and still His child, though I am so far, so far----’ He caught my hand in his, and pointed with the other trembling. ‘Look! your eyes are more clear than mine, for they are not anxious like mine. Can you see anything upon the way?’ The waste lay wild before us, dark with a faintly-rising cloud, for darkness and cloud and the gloom of death attended upon that name. I thought, in his great genius and splendour of intellect, he had gone mad, as sometimes may be. ‘There is nothing,’ I said, and scorn came into my soul; but even as I spoke I saw--I cannot tell what I saw--a moving spot of milky whiteness in that dark and miserable wilderness,--no bigger than a man’s hand, no bigger than a flower. ‘There is something,’ I said unwillingly; ‘it has no shape nor form. It is a gossamer-web upon some bush, or a butterfly blown on the wind.’ ‘There are neither butterflies nor gossamers here.’