I am not ungrateful for this delight; it may, I know, be withdrawn from me; but meanwhile the world seems to be full to the brim of expressive and significant things. There is a beautiful old story of a saint who saw in a vision a shining figure approaching him, holding in his hand a dark and cloudy globe. He held it out, and the saint looking attentively upon it, saw that it appeared to represent the earth in miniature; there were the continents and seas, with clouds sweeping over them; and, for all that it was so minute, he could see cities and plains, and little figures moving to and fro. The angel laid his finger on a part of the globe, and detached from it a small cluster of islands, drawing them out of the sea; and the saint saw that they were peopled by a folk, whom he knew, in some way that he could not wholly understand, to be dreary and uncomforted. He heard a voice saying, "_He taketh up the isles as a very small thing_"; and it darted into his mind that his work lay with the people of those sad islands; that he was to go thither, and speak to them a message of hope. It is a beautiful story; and it has always seemed to me that the work of the artist is like that. He is to detach from the great peopled globe what little portion seems to appeal to him most; and he must then say what he can to encourage and sustain men, whatever thoughts of joy and hope come most home to him in his long and eager pilgrimage. XIX Hamlet We were talking yesterday about the stage, a subject in which I am ashamed to confess I take but a feeble interest, though I fully recognise the appeal of the drama to certain minds, and its possibilities. One of the party, who had all his life been a great frequenter of theatres, turned to me and said: "After all, there is one play which seems to be always popular, and to affect all audiences, the poor, the middle-class, the cultivated, alike--_Hamlet_." "Yes," I said, "and I wonder why that is?" "Well," he said, "it is this, I think: that beneath all its subtleties, all its intellectual force, it has an emotional appeal to every one who has lived in the world; every one sees himself more or less in Hamlet; every one has been in a situation in which he felt that circumstances were too strong for him; and then, too," he added, "there is always a deep and romantic interest about the case of a man who has every possible external advantage, youth, health, wealth, rank, love, ardour, and zest, who is yet utterly miserable, and moves to a dark end under a shadow of doom."