“Aren't they beautiful? Haven't they the very breath of ambition and enthusiasm? But poor father! How soon the brightness melted away! He never repined, though. Oh, no, never. Indeed, he used to laugh and joke at our dreams and our castles in the air. 'You must do it all yourself, Nannie; you shall have all the cakes and ale.' Yes, when he was a dying man he would joke like that. But sometimes he would grow serious, and then he would say, 'Give little Philip some for all. He'll deserve it more than me. Oh, God,' he would say, 'let me think to myself when I'm _there_, you've missed the good things of life, but your son has got them; you are here, but he is on the heights; lie still, thou poor aspiring heart, lie still in your grave and rest.'” Philip felt like a bird struggling in the meshes of a net. “My father was a poet, Auntie, trying to be a man of the world. That was the real mischief in his life, if you think of it.” Auntie Nan looked up with her needle at poise above the sampler, and said in a nervous voice, “The real mischief of your father's life, Philip, was love--what they call love. But love is not that. Love is peace and virtue, and right living, and that is only madness and frenzy, and when people wake up from it they wake up as from a nightmare. Men talk of it as a holy thing--it is unholy. Books are written in praise of it--I would have such books burnt. When anybody falls to it, he is like a blind man who has lost his guide, tottering straight to the precipice. Women fall to it too. Yes, good women as well as good men; I have seen them tempted----” Philip was certain of it now. Some one had been prying upon him at Sulby. He was angry, and his anger spent itself on Auntie Nan in a torrent of words. “You are wrong, Aunt Anne, quite wrong. Love is the one lovely thing in life. It is beauty, it is poetry. Call it passion if you will--what would the world be like without it? A place where every human heart would be an island standing alone; a place without children, without joy, without merriment, without laughter. No, no; Heaven has given us love, and we are wrong when we try to put it away. We cannot put it away, and when we make the attempt we are punished for our pride and arrogance. It ought to be enough for us to let heaven decide whether we are to be great men or little men, and to decide for ourselves whether we are to be good men and happy men. And the greatest happiness of life is love. Heaven would have to work a miracle to enable us to live without it. But Heaven does not work such a miracle, because the greatest miracle of heaven is love itself.” The needle hand of Auntie Nan was trembling above her sampler, and her lips were twitching.