No, no: of this he felt sure. In the Beauty of the World lies the ultimate redemption of our mortality. When we shall become at one with nature in a sense profounder even than the poetic imaginings of most of us, we shall understand what now we fail to discern. The arrogance of those who would have the stars as candles for our night, and the universe as a pleasance for our thought, will be as impossible as their blind fatuity who say we are of dust, briefly vitalised, that shall be dust again, with no fragrance saved from the rude bankruptcy of life, no beauty raised up against the sun to bloom anew. It is no idle dream, this: no idle dream that we are a perishing clan among the sons of God, because of this slow waning of our joy, of our passionate delight, in the Beauty of the World. We have been unable to look out upon the shining of our star, for the vision overcomes us; and we have used veils which we call "scenery," "picturesqueness," and the like--poor, barren words that are so voiceless and remote before the rustle of leaves and the lap of water, before the ancient music of the wind, and all the sovran eloquence of the tides of light. But a day may come--nay, shall surely come--when indeed the poor and the humble shall inherit the earth: they who have not made a league with temporal evils and out of whose heart shall arise the deep longing, that shall become universal, of the renewal of youth. ... Often, too, alone in his observatory, where he was wont to spend much of his time, Alan knew that strange nostalgia of the mind for impossible things. Then, wrought for a while from his vision of green life, and flamed by another green fire than that born of the earth, he dreamed his dream. With him, the peopled solitude of night was a concourse of confirming voices. He did not dread the silence of the stars, the cold remoteness of the stellar fire. In that other watch-tower in Paris, where he had spent the best hours of his youth, he had loved that nightly watch on the constellations. Now, as then, in the pulse of the planets he found assurances which faith had not given him. In the vast majestic order of that nocturnal march, that diurnal retreat, he had learned the law of the whirling leaf and the falling star, of the slow æon-delayed comet and of the slower wane of solar fires. Looking with visionary eyes into that congregation of stars, he realised, not the littleness of the human dream, but its divine impulsion. It was only when, after long vigils into the quietudes of night, he turned his gaze from the palaces of the unknown, and thought of the baffled fretful swarming in the cities of men, that his soul rose in revolt against the sublime ineptitude of man's spiritual leaguer against destiny.