terror-stricken child, to whom the infinite bosom of tenderness and love stretches out arms of shelter and healing and life, she turned to the bosom of death, and imagined there a shelter of oblivious darkness!  For life is a thing so deep, so high, so pure, so far above the reach of common thought, that, although shadowed out in all the harmonic glories of color, and speech, and song, and scent, and motion, and shine, yea, even of eyes and loving hands, to common minds—­and the more merely intellectual, the commoner are they—­it seems but a phantasm.  To unchildlike minds, the region of love and worship, to which lead the climbing stairs of duty, is but a nephelocockygia; they acknowledge the stairs, however, thank God, and if they will but climb, a hand will be held out to them.  Now, to pray to a God, the very thought of whose possible existence might seem enough to turn the coal of a dead life into a diamond of eternal radiance, is with many such enough to stamp a man a fool.  It will surprise me nothing in the new world to hear such men, finding they are not dead after all, begin at once to argue that they were quite right in refusing to act upon any bare possibility—­forgetting that the questioning of possibilities has been the source of all scientific knowledge.  They may say that to them there seemed no possibility; upon which will come the question—­whence arose their incapacity for seeing it?  In the meantime, that the same condition which constitutes the bliss of a child, should also be the essential bliss of a man, is incomprehensible to him in whom the child is dead, or so fast asleep that nothing but a trumpet of terror can awake him.  That the rules of the nursery—­I mean the nursery where the true mother is the present genius, not the hell at the top of a London house—­that the rules of the nursery over which broods a wise mother with outspread wings of tenderness, should be the laws also of cosmic order, of a world’s well-being, of national greatness, and of all personal dignity, may well be an old-wives’-fable to the man who dabbles at saving the world by science, education, hygiene and other economics.  There is a knowledge that will do it, but of that he knows so little, that he will not allow it to be a knowledge at all.  Into what would he save the world?  His paradise would prove a ten times more miserable condition than that out of which he thought to rescue it.

But any thing that gives objectivity to trouble, that lifts the cloud so far that, if but for a moment, it shows itself a cloud, instead of being felt an enveloping, penetrating, palsying mist—­setting it where the mind can in its turn prey upon it, can play with it, paint it, may come to sing of it, is a great help toward what health may yet be possible for the troubled soul.  With a woman’s instinct, Dorothy borrowed from the curate a volume of a certain more attractive edition of Shakespeare than she herself possessed, and left it in Juliet’s way, so arranged