but, as all common things, overwhelming at the first moment of their complete realisation. The original frame of his mind joined a defiance of formal precedent and an intense openness to every fine pleasure of sense with an impatience of all that makes for secrecy and an abhorrence of the substitutes which are sometimes basely, sometimes madly, accepted in default of true objects. He could not desire the star and find solace in the glow-worm--pursue Isolde and lag by the way with Moll Flanders. It was true that he had resolved to put stars and Isolde alike from his life. It was true that he had bound himself to certain fair ambitions beyond the determinations of calculation and experience. It was true that he had resolved to sacrifice this world to the next. He knew the claims which the world to come has upon us. But did he know the world he was renouncing? How that doubt opened the way to further doubts! Was he a fool for his pains? Was an enfeebling and afflicting of the natural man so necessary to the exaltation of the soul? Was the soul in itself so weak that it could only rest decently in a sick body? Could it only wish for something greater than this earth can give by being artificially saddened? Such questions have their answers, but they do not occur very readily to young men hopelessly in love and half out of their wits with jealousy. He might have taken refuge in prayer, but at that moment he did not want to pray. He wanted to think about himself, to be himself throughout the entire reach of his consciousness, to lose himself in the tempest of emotion which seemed to drive out, beat, and shatter every hindrance to its furious sweep. A smouldering fire is for a while got under, and yet by suppression is but thrown in, to spread more widely and deeply than before. So his fatal affection, perhaps pitilessly fought down in the first instance--asserted its power--its power for evil. Not to love was not to live. He was dead while he lived. He could not find peace in an invisible world of which he did not see any more even a shadow round about him. _Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?_ He did not believe that. What miserable scruples to torment, blind, and pollute the soul! Pascal has written that there are thousands who sin without regret, who sin with gladness, who feel no warning and no interior desire not to sin. They doubted, hated, loved, acted, felt, and thought just as they pleased. Perhaps they were not happy, but if they received the punishment of wrong-doing, the wrong at least was committed out of fetters and joyously. It is not until men find themselves assailed by a strong wish that they perceive how very still and very small, all but inaudible, the still, small voice can be. A moment comes when one ceases to think--one wills, and if one is able and the will is sufficiently determined, the purpose is carried into effect. Temptations to steal, to lie, to