But am I then satisfied with the part I play?  Do I feel that my faculties are being used, that I am lending a hand to the great sum of toil?  I used to feel that, or thought I felt it, in the old days, but now I see that I walked in a vain delusion, serving my own joy, my own self-importance.  Not that I think my old toil all ill-spent; that was my work before, as surely as it is not now; but the old intentness, the old watching for tone and gesture, for action and situation, that has all shifted its gaze, and waits upon God.  It may be, nay it is certain, that I have far to go, much to learn; but now that I may perhaps recover my strength, life spreads out into sunny shallows, moving slow and clear.  It is like a soft sweet interlude between two movements of fire and glow; for I see now, what then I could not see, that something in my life was burnt and shrivelled up in my enforced silence and in my bitter loss—­ then, when I felt my energies at their lowest, when mind and bodily frame alike flapped loose, like a flag of smut upon the bars of a grate, I was living most intensely, and the soul’s wings grew fast, unfolding plume and feather.  It was then that life burnt with its fiercest heat, when it withdrew me, faintly struggling, away from all that pleased and caressed the mind and the body, into the silent glow of the furnace.  Strange that I should not have perceived it!  But now I see in all maimed and broken lives, the lives that seem most idle and helpless, most futile and vain, that the same fierce flame is burning bright about them; that the reason why they cannot spread and flourish, like flowers, into the free air, is because the strong roots are piercing deep, entwining themselves firmly among the stones, piercing the cold silent crevices of the earth.  Ay, indeed!  The coal in the furnace, burning passively and hotly, is as much a force, though it but lies and suffers, as the energy that throbs in the leaping piston-rod or the rushing wheel.  Not in success and noise and triumph does the soul grow; when the body rejoices, when the mind is prodigal of seed, the spirit sits within in a darkened chamber, like a folded chrysalis, stiff as a corpse, in a faint dream.  But when triumphs have no savour, when the cheek grows pale and the eye darkens, then the dark chrysalis opens, and the rainbow wings begin to spread and glow, uncrumpling to the suns of paradise.  My soul has taken wings, and sits poised and delicate, faint with long travail, perhaps to hover awhile about the garden blooms and the chalices of honied flowers, perhaps to take her flight beyond the glade, over the forest, to the home of her desirous heart.  I know not!  Yet in these sunlit hours, with the slow, strong pulse of life beating round me, it seems that something is preparing for one struck dumb and crushed with sorrow to the earth.  How soft a thrill of hope throbs in the summer air!  How the bird-voices in the thicket, and the rustle of burnished leaves, and the hum of insects, blend into a secret harmony, a cadence half-heard!  I wait in love and confidence; and through the trees of the garden One seems ever to draw nearer, walking in the cool of the day, at whose bright coming the flowers look upwards unashamed.  Shall I be bidden to meet Him!  Will He call me loud or low?