* * * * * My sad youth worshipped at the piteous height Where God vouchsafed the death of man to share; His love made mortal sorrow light to bear, But his deep wounds put joy to shaméd flight, And though his arms outstretched upon the tree, Were beautiful, and pleaded my embrace, My sins were loth to look upon his face. So came I down from Golgotha to thee, Eternal Mother; let the sun and sea Heal me, and keep me in thy dwelling-place. The succeeding sonnet traces the winding of the new way, the reluctance, the … many farewell pious looks behind, And dumb misgivings where the path might wind, And questionings of nature, as I went,— which every life duplicates as it leaves its well-guarded walls of belief and ventures out upon undiscovered ways. The pain of letting go the old, the loneliness of the new, the alien look of all the heights that encompass one, and the psychology of that impulse by which one is both impelled to retrace his way and withheld from it,—are suggested by the sonnet. In the next occurs one of Mr. Santayana’s finest lines, the counsel To trust the soul’s invincible surmise. It would be difficult to define intuition more succinctly than this. It is not, as less subtle poets would have put it, the soul’s assurance that one is to trust; this would be to assume, for what assurance have we but that which Mr. Santayana has so subtly termed the “invincible surmise”? Lines which lead one out into speculative thought are frequent in Mr. Santayana’s sonnets. His philosophy is constructive only in so far as it unifies a succession of moods and experiences; but it is pregnant with suggestion to a psychological mind. One of the sonnets which questions: Of my two lives, which should I call the dream? Which action vanity? which vision sight?— after declaring that Some greater waking must pronounce aright and blend the two visions to one seeing, continues: Even such a dream I dream, and know full well My waking passeth like a midnight spell, But know not if my dreaming breaketh through Into the deeps of heaven and of hell. I know but this of all I would I knew: Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true. The thought in this passage is elusive, but it is more than a play upon words. It is another way of putting the question, which shall be trusted, which shall become the reality, the objective or the subjective world? One knows that his “waking,” his sense perception, is transitory, that it apprehends but the present, which “passeth like a midnight spell,” but how far does the other and finer sight penetrate Into the deeps of heaven and of hell? No answer from the void to this query, but by the mystical conclusion that Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true.