rights, and love remained the supreme refuge of all those on whom the chains of life weighed too heavily. Here, at least, in the isolation of this secret temple, we told ourselves that no one entered with us. Here, for an instant, we could breathe; here, at last, it was our soul that reigned, and free was its choice in that which was the centre of liberty itself! But now we are told that it is not for our own sake that we love. We are told that in the very temple of love we do but obey the unvarying orders of an invisible throng. We are told that a thousand centuries divide us from ourselves when we choose the woman we love, and that the first kiss of the betrothed is but the seal that thousands of hands, craving for birth, impress upon the lips of the mother they desire. And, further, we know that the dead do not die. We know now that it is not in our churches that they are to be found, but in the houses, the habits, of us all. That there is not a gesture, a thought, a sin, a tear, an atom of acquired consciousness that is lost in the depths of the earth; and that at the most insignificant of our acts our ancestors arise, not in their tombs where they move not, but in ourselves, where they always live.... Thus are we led by past and future. And the present, which is the substance of us, sinks to the bottom of the sea, like some tiny island at which two irreconcilable oceans have been unceasingly gnawing. Heredity, will, destiny, all mingle noisily in our soul; but, notwithstanding everything, far above everything, it is the silent star that reigns. No matter with what temporary labels we may bedeck the monstrous vases that contain the invisible, words can tell us scarcely anything of that which should be told. Heredity, nay destiny itself, what are these but a ray of this star, a ray that is lost in the mysterious night? And all that is might well be more mysterious still. ‘We give the name of destiny to all that limits us,’ says one of the great sages of our time: wherefore it behoves us to be grateful to all those who tremblingly grope their way the side of the frontier. ‘If we are brutal and barbarous,’ he goes on, ‘fatality takes a form that is brutal and barbarous. As refinement comes to us, so do our mishaps become refined. If we rise to spiritual culture, antagonism takes unto itself a spiritual form.’ It is perhaps true that even as our soul soars aloft, so does it purify destiny, although it is also true that we are menaced by the self-same sorrows that menace the savages. But we have other sorrows of which they have no suspicion; and the spirit, as it rises, does but discover still more, at every horizon. ‘We give the name of destiny to all that limits us.’ Let us do our utmost that destiny become not too circumscribed. It is good to enlarge one’s sorrows, since thus does enlargement come to our consciousness, and there, there alone do we truly feel that we live. And it is also