barren aspects, the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a delight.  Do but perceive that we are coming to philosophy, the stride toward it will be a giant’s—­a century a day.  And imagine the celestial refreshment of having a pure decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending.  Honourable will fiction then appear; honourable, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick with our blood.  Why, when you behold it you love it—­and you will not encourage it?—­or only when presented by dead hands?  Worse than that alternative dirty drab, your recurring rose-pink is rebuked by hideous revelations of the filthy foul; for nature will force her way, and if you try to stifle her by drowning, she comes up, not the fairest part of her uppermost!  Peruse your Realists—­really your castigators for not having yet embraced Philosophy.  As she grows in the flesh when discreetly tended, nature is unimpeachable, flower-eke, yet not too decoratively a flower; you must have her with the stem, the thorns, the roots, and the fat bedding of roses.  In this fashion she grew, says historical fiction; thus does she flourish now, would say the modern transcript, reading the inner as well as exhibiting the outer.

And how may you know that you have reached to Philosophy?  You touch her skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of sentimentalism.  You are one with her when—­but I would not have you a thousand years older!  Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental route:—­that very winding path, which again and again brings you round to the point of original impetus, where you have to be unwound for another whirl; your point of original impetus being the grossly material, not at all the spiritual.  It is most true that sentimentalism springs from the former, merely and badly aping the latter,—­fine flower, or pinnacle flame-spire, of sensualism that it is, could it do other? and accompanying the former it traverses tracts of desert here and there couching in a garden, catching with one hand at fruits, with another at colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded by an appetite, sustained by sheer gratifications.  Fiddle in harmonics as it may, it will have these gratifications at all costs.  Should none be discoverable, at once you are at the Cave of Despair, beneath the funereal orb of Glaucoma, in the thick midst of poniarded, slit-throat, rope-dependant figures, placarded across the bosom Disillusioned, Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus.  That is the sentimental route to advancement.  Spirituality does not light it; evanescent dreams:  are its oil-lamps, often with wick askant in the socket.