‘To be or do any limited thing’!  What indeed, we ask in such hours, is a limited thing, when all the humble interests of our daily life are palpably big with eternity?  Is the first kiss of a great love a limited thing? though there is, unhappily, no denying that it comes to an end!  When a young husband and wife smile across to each other above the sleep of their little child—­is that a limited thing?  When the siren voices of the world blend together on the lips of a young poet, and with rapt eyes and hot heart he makes a song as of the morning stars—­is that a limited thing?  Are love, and genius, and duty done in the face of death—­are these limited things?  I think not—­and man, indeed, knows better.

Greatness is not relative.  It is absolute.  It is not for man to depress himself by measuring himself against the eternities and the immensities external to him.  What he has to do is to look inward upon himself, to fathom the eternities and the immensities in his own heart and brain.

And the more man sees himself forsaken by the universe, the more opportunity to vindicate his own greatness.  Is there no kind heart beating through the scheme of things?—­man’s heart shall still be kind.  Will the eternal silence make mock of his dreams and his idealisms, laugh coldly at ‘the splendid purpose in his eyes’?  Well, so be it.  His dreams and idealisms are none the less noble things, and if the gods do thus make mock of mortal joy and pain—­let us be grateful that we were born mere men.

Moreover, he has one great answer to the universe—­the answer of courage.  He is still Prometheus, and there is no limit to what he can bear.  Let the vultures of pain rend his heart as they will, he can still hiss ‘coward’ in the face of the Eternal.  Nay, he can even laugh at his sufferings—­thanks to the spirit of humour, that most blessed of ministering angels, without which surely the heart of humanity had long since broken, by which man is able to look with a comical eye upon terrors, as it were taking themselves so seriously, coming with such Olympian thunders and lightnings to break the spirit of a mere six foot of earth!

But while his courage and his humour are defences of which he cannot be disarmed, whatever be the intention of the Eternal, it is by no means certain that nature does not mean kindly by man.  Perhaps the pain of the world is but the rough horseplay of great powers that mean but jest—­and kill us in it:  as though one played at ‘tick’ with an elephant!

Perhaps, after all,—­who knows?—­God is love, and His great purpose kind.

Surely, when you think of it, the existence in man of the senses of love and pity implies the probability of their existence elsewhere in the universe too.

  ’Into that breast which brings the rose
  Shall I with shuddering fall.’

So runs the profoundest thought in modern poetry—­and need I say it is Mr. Meredith’s?