It was, I believe—­I may be wholly wrong—­a picture of Reuben, looking in an agony of unavailing sorrow into the pit from which his brothers had drawn the boy they hated to sell him to the Midianites.  I cannot recollect the details plainly, and little remains but a memory of dim-lit azure and glowing scarlet.  Even though the pit was quaintly depicted as a draw-well, with a solid stone coping, the pretty absurdity of the thought only made one love the fancy better.  But the figure of Reuben!—­even through an obscuring mist of crossing leads and window-bars and weather stains, there was a poignant agony wrought into the pose of the figure, with its clasped hands and strained gaze.

I used to wonder, I say, what further thing it meant.  For the deep spell of art is that it holds an intenser, a wider significance beneath its symbols than the mere figure, the mere action it displays.

What was the remorse of Reuben?  It was that through his weakness, his complaisance, he had missed his chance of protecting what was secretly dear to him.  He loved the boy, I think, or at all events he loved his father, and would not willingly have hurt the old man.  And now, even in his moment of yielding, of temporising, the worst had happened, the child was gone, delivered over to what baseness of usage he could not bear to think.  He himself had been a traitor to love and justice and light; and yet, in the fruitful designs of God, that very traitorous deed was to blossom into the hope and glory of the race; the deed itself was to be tenderly forgiven, and it was to open up, in the fulness of days, a prospect of greatness and prosperity to the tribe, to fling the seed of that mighty family in soil where it was to be infinitely enriched; it was to open the door at last to a whole troop of great influences, marvellous events, large manifestations of God.

Even so, in a parable, the figure came insistently before me all day, shining and fading upon the dark background of the mind.

It was at the loss of my own soul that I had connived; not at its death indeed—­I had not plotted for that—­but I had betrayed myself, I saw, year by year.  I had despised the dreams and visions of the frail and ingenuous spirit; and when it had come out trustfully to me in the wilderness, I had let it fall into the hands of the Midianites, the purloining band that trafficked in all things, great and small, from the beast of the desert to the bodies and souls of men.

My soul had thus lain expiring before my eyes, and now God had taken it away from my faithless hands; I saw at last that to save the soul one must assuredly lose it; that if it was to grow strong and joyful and wise, it must be sold into servitude and dark afflictions.  I saw that when I was too weak to save it, God had rent it from me, but that from the darkness of the pit it should fare forth upon a mighty voyage, and be made pure and faithful in a region undreamed of.