We treat disillusions often with scantiest justice. We conceive them of sorrowful countenance, pale and discouraged; whereas they are really the very first smiles of truth. Why should disillusion distress you, if you are a man of honest intention, if you strive to be just, and of service; if you seek to be happy and wise? Would you rather live on in the world of your dreams and your errors than in the world that is real? Only too often does many a promising nature waste its most precious hours in the struggle of beautiful dream against inevitable law, whose beauty is only perceived when every vestige of strength has been sapped by the exquisite dream. If love has deceived you, do you think that it would have been better for you all your life to regard love as something it is not, and never can be? Would such an illusion not warp your most significant actions; would it not for many days hide from you some part of the truth that you seek? Or if you imagine that greatness lay in your grasp, and disillusion has taken you back to your place in the second rank; have you the right, for the rest of your life, to curse the envoy of truth? For, after all, was it not truth your illusion was seeking, assuming it to have been sincere? We should try to regard disillusions as mysterious, faithful friends, as councillors none can corrupt, And should there be one more cruel than the rest, that for an instant prostrates you, do not murmur to yourself through your tears that life is less beautiful than you had dreamed it to be, but rather that in your dream there must have been something lacking, since real life has failed to approve. And indeed the much-vaunted strength of the strenuous soul is built up of disillusions only, that this soul has cheerfully welcomed. Every deception and love disappointed, every hope that has crumbled to dust, is possessed of a strength of its own that it adds to the strength of your truth; and the more disillusions there are that fall to the earth at your feet, the more surely and nobly will great reality shine on you--even as the rays of the sun are beheld the more clearly in winter, as they pierce through the leafless branches of the trees of the forest.