of graves, a vast necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its phantoms,—­and there is no comfort anywhere.  Happy is he if some simple human duty be at hand, which he may go on doing blindly and dumbly—­till, perhaps, the light come again.  It is difficult to offer comfort to such a one.  Comfort is cheap, and we know nothing.  When life holds nothing for our love and delight, it is difficult to explain why we should go on living it—­except on the assumption that it matters, that it is, in some mystical way, supremely important, how we live it, and what we make of those joys and sorrows which, say some, are but meant as mystical trials and tests.

Sebastian van Storck refused ‘to be or do any limited thing,’ but the answer to his mysticism is to be found in a finer mysticism, that which says that there is no limited act or thing, but that the significance, as well as the pathos, of eternity is in our smallest joys and sorrows, as in our most everyday transactions, and the greatness of God incarnate in His humblest child.

This, the old doctrine of the microcosm, seems in certain moments, moments one would wish to say, of divination, strangely plain and clear—­when, in Blake’s words, it seems so easy to

  ’... see a world in a grain of sand,
    And a heaven in a wild flower;
  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
    And Eternity in an hour.’

Perhaps in the street, an effect of light, a passing face, yes, even the plaintive grind of a street organ, some such everyday circumstance, affects you suddenly in quite a strange way.  It has become universalised.  It is no longer a detail of the Strand, but a cryptic symbol of human life.  It has been transfigured into a thing of infinite pathos and infinite beauty, and, sad or glad, brings to you an inexplicable sense of peace, an unshakable conviction that man is a spirit, that his life is indeed of supreme and lovely significance, and that his destiny is secure and blessed.

Matthew Arnold, ever sensitive to such spiritual states, has described these trance-like visitations in ’The Buried Life’—­

  ’Only, but this is rare—­
  When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
  When, jaded with the rush and glare
  Of the interminable hours,
  Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
  When our world-deafen’d ear
  Is by the tones of a loved voice caress’d—­
  A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
  And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again: 
  The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
  And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. 
  A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
  And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
  The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

  ’And there arrives a lull in the hot race
  Wherein he doth for ever chase
  That flying and elusive shadow, rest. 
  An air of coolness plays upon his face,
  And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. 
  And then he thinks he knows
  The hills where his life rose,
  And the sea where it goes.’