which I set out, to the guide who first opened the depths of my life, and who, through his own suffering, found the pathway into the heart of the mystery which I have missed in all my searching. When I remember how earnestly men have striven to think their way into the secrets of the universe, and how certainly they have failed, I see clearly that only he who lives into truth finds it, and that love alone is immortal."

Here the writing ended, and Norton felt himself in the presence of a mind as great and as sincere as his own. He replaced the loose sheets in the volume and laid the little book in its place; in his joy that any impulse from his own heart had touched and inspired another across the gulf of years he had found the true immortality. The fire had burned out, and as he bent over it to find some live coal among the ashes, the little clock on the mantel chimed two, and with a start he found himself in his own study.

CHAPTER IX.

A FLAME OF DRIFTWOOD.

WE have been sitting to-night before a fire of driftwood, and, as the many-colored flames have shot up, flickered, and gone out, thought has made all manner of vagrant journeyings. Rosalind has occasionally commented on some splendid tongue of fire, but for the most part we have been silent. There are nights-noctes ambrosiana-when inspiring talk, that nectar of the gods, has held us long and made us reluctant to cover the smoldering embers. There are other nights when we fall under some spell of silence, and the world without us stirs into strange vividness the world within, and the chief importance of things visible and tangible seem to be their power to loosen thought and set it free to spread its wings in the empyrean. When one falls into this mood and sits slippered and at ease before the crooning fire, while the wintry winds are trumpeting abroad, one easily comprehends the charm of Oriental mysticism; the charm of unbroken silence in which one pursues and at last overtakes himself. The world has vanished like a phantasmagoria; duties and cares and responsibilities have gone with the material relations and pursuits which

gave them birth; one is alone with himself, and within the invisible horizons of his own thought all mysteries are hidden and revealed. I have often thought that if I ever turn heretic I shall be a fireworshiper. These volatile flames have immense powers of disintegration; one can imagine the visiible universe crumbling into ashes at their touch. But when they dance before the eye the disintegration they effect has something of the miracle of creation in it; so alive does the imagination become when this glow touches it, so swift is thought to pursue and overtake that which entirely eludes it by the light of day! I can hardly imagine myself sitting motionless in broad daylight, in the unbroken calm of an anticipated Nirvana; but I can easily fancy myself under the perpetual spell of the fire spirit dreaming forever of worlds in which I have never lived.

The peculiar fascination of a driftwood fire is partly material and partly imaginative. The brilliancy of the flame, the unexpected transformations of color, the swift movement of the restless waves of fire from log to log, the sudden splendor of hue breaking out of smoky blackness-all these material features supplement the unfailing association of the fagots themselves. They have no audible speech to report their journeyings, but the tropical richness of the flame which consumes them hints at all manner of strange wanderings in remote and strange parts of the earth. The secret of the sea where it breaks,

phosphorescent, on the islands of the equator, seems to be hiding itself within those weird, bewildering flames. One feels as if he were near the mystery of that vast, dim life of the great seas so alien from all save the kindred solitariness and majesty of the heavens; one feels as if something deeper and stranger than articulate life were revealing itself before him, if he but had the wit to understand it. This vast, silent world which girdles our little world of speech and action, as the great seas hold some island locked in their immeasurable wastes is it not this sublime background of mystery which gives our books, our art, our achievements, their deepest and most pathetic meaning? One lays down a great book with a penetrating sense of its inadequacy. Judged by any human standard, we recognize its noble completeness; but measured against the world of suffering which it portrays, how like a solitary star it shines out of gulfs of impenetrable darkness! Scholars are still discussing the problem which Shakespeare presented in "Hamlet"; but as one takes up the tragedy in some moment of deeper insight and becomes suddenly conscious in his own thought of its deeper significance, becomes suddenly aware of the outlying gloom in which the poet's torch is swallowed up, how small the question of real or feigned insanity becomes! The slow transformation of purpose into action has never been more completely or more marvelously told than in "The Ring and the Book." Never before

have the secret processes of different minds been studied with such intensity of insight and brought to light with such vividness and splendor of expression. But when Count Guido and Pompilia and Caponsacchi and the Pope have each told their story, is it not the finest result of Browning's art that the pathos of the tragedy oppresses us as something still unexpressed, something essentially inexpressible? The secret of every great work of art is its power to send the imagination to search for itself in the dim world out of which it comes, never as a perfect creation, but always as a witness to the existence of something greater than itself. Our noblest words and works are to the great realities which they strive to reveal what the text-books of astronomy are to the immeasurable heavens of which they speak. It would be a poor world if any genius of man could fathom it and any language of man express it!

As the driftwood fire flickers and dances, I seem to feel about me the vast, dim seas whose hidden splendor it has brought into my study, and touched the oldest books with a new association, with a deep and strange suggestiveness. How imperfect are the most famous of these transcriptions of the soul and the wonderful world through which it travels; and yet how marvelously true and deep they are! Like these fagots, carelessly gathered on the beach, they have caught the secret of the fathomless deeps, and they are touched with a beauty not their own.