truth and beauty that lie beneath. And when these snatched waifs of truth are gathered and displayed, and we find them match with strays of truth that we have not snatched, but which are yet in the world, when I say waifs and strays are gathered alike at the end of life, and the beautiful has been extracted from beneath the foul, and shines forth, and truth, first seen only as a point, flashes forth everywhere on the circle of life, manifest to the soul, though hid from sense, and at last unobstructed by sense,-then is the end of life achieved. But we must wait (for this achievement) our appointed threescore years and ten.] [S (§ 87) So I come back to where we started from; the impulse to sympathize with the lawlessness of these strolling actors, to see what it meant, and to learn some such lessons of life as I have tried to express. And if some of these lessons of life were abstruse, it was a dream that impelled me to teach them. (88) For I am but a dreamer and no poet; poets are not troubled with such fancies as mine, such as seek other vent than poetry, and often exceed reasonable bounds.]

(§ 89) I sat dreaming in the house this morning, with the windows wide, and sights and sounds pleasant enough were given to me; but fancies too came thronging in, which by no means could be reduced to visible or articulate shape by any skill of mine. (§ 90) So as my fancies began to overtask my feeling, and its power of expression finds best help in music, I bethought me of music to express and fix these my fancies. (§ 91) I played Schumann's Carnival, choosing it, you see, as harmonizing with the mood wrought on me by the fair here, and its strolling company. I knew that in that company was some one, reserved by fate, to give me the electric spark of sympathy, which proves that, do but each of us link hands, we can find in the dark of the world the fire of Truth, until the whole human race, high and low, is united in one chain: the fair expands to the Carnival, the Carnival to the world.

(§ 92) As I played, and remarked how each musical theme in the piece was, so to say, new dressed, I saw thence how truth is served to us in successive generations as at a banquet, the viand the same, the seasoning changed according to the era at which the truth is being discussed as food. For the essential food, the facts of life, truth, in short, never vary; their expression (seasoning of the meat), whether in art or life, is always changing, and though such newness, change of expression, is repugnant at first (as is a new sauce to the palate), it soon becomes a necessity to the souls of men (as does the new sauce to the gradually accustomed palate). Most of all is this apparent in music as a form of expressing truth. For in music change of method is its law, and what is precious or rare in music is, not the Absolute, fundamental good, but freshness of presentation of that absolute or good-surprise in

short. (§ 93) After playing the piece I dozed (§ 94), and seemed to see the Carnival at Venice.

(§ 95) I looked on it as from the height of a pinnacle. I saw an immense concourse of men and women, all masked. The masks were of all sorts-beasts, birds, fishes, old men, and young; (§ 96) nay, masks such as showed what the man had become through some one passion, love, or hate. (§ 97) And I asked, why must some such one love or hate task each soul, and draw it its own way, and shape it so? This thought made me observe closer. I discovered that the crowd was dumb; no sound arose from them. (§ 98) But as in dreams one always knows the why and wherefore of everything, I seemed in my dream to know the reason of the crowd's silence. They did speak, but in my dream I knew that I was not to know their speech, but to learn by sight of their masks, not by hearing their speech, what they really were. A blind man (said I) must get truth by hearing; I, seeing, can know, and so dispense with speech. Then let me come closer among them. (§ 99) As I descended amidst them, their masks showed less than had at first seemed apparent of divergence from humanity, less of change by reason of slavery to some ruling passion. (§ 100) Still, though I saw them talk, saw their mouths move, saw their eyes strive to look what the voice was saying, their words and my understanding were not en rapport with each other. I could not understand their speech; but my observation by sight, not by hearing, helped me to see the truth by what men looked like, not what they said. (§ 101) And I found that each quality thus learned assumed its proper use, and seemed good for something. What at first seemed ugly withered off, and my repugnance to the seeming wrongness or ugliness perished with it. I found myself able to choose what, among the different qualities, to observe, and what to ignore or escape from. Nay, by changing my point of view, I could see how grotesqueness and divergence from beauty assumed another shape, were corrected, added to, subtracted from, and each brute-beast tendency became of use as safeguards to mankind. I found that force and guile are active agents in preservation of life, that peace is only good because strife preceded it, that love is the more precious the more we know of hate, and knowledge the more precious the more we abhor ignorance. (§ 102) I found that I must lessen my scorn of the flesh, the soul's case, for it is distinct from the soul. The soul is, as it were, a drop of dew encased in a crystal globe, i. e. the flesh and its attributes -purse-pride, desire to be what one cannot be, lust for praise, and all outwardly-seen qualities—are the crystal round the dewdrop, the case round the soul. (§ 103) And my delight in watching this crowd was such as a chemist experiences who, unbinding composites, tying

simples together, and tracing back each effect to a cause, constructs in fancy from the fewest primitives the complex and complete, all the diverse life of beast, bird, reptile, insect, plant, earth, and ore. So I, observing and learning through these various manifestations of men the truth underneath them, separating the composite qualities in each nature into simple ones, tracing the effect (each nature as I saw it in its development) back to the cause (the reason why that nature had become such a development), learned what each man really was from what he appeared to be, and thus gained my object, satisfied my desire of knowing what I myself am, of living my life truly, and knowing why I live it. So I arrived through the fleshly manifestation of falseness, at the true soul beneath, and learned how the naked soul obtained its chequered robe of flesh. (§ 104) I am glad to get all that knowledge and experience, thought I in my dream; but why at Venice rather than elsewhere? (§ 105) And I became aware that a change ensued. (§ 106) And even as while watching a sunset we see the cloud-buildings gradually crumble, fuse, and blend into each other (§ 107), so as I looked in my dream on the amphitheatre which held the Carnival, I saw that while the stir of men continued, a subtle change was going on in one and all of the buildings that formed the amphitheatre, from Mark's Church downwards. Each building became not new, but older,-familiar like houses anywhere one sees any day. (§ 108) I became convinced that what I took for Venice was the world, the Carnival, the masque of mankind, lifelong. I saw the reason of my disgust at the apparent grotesquerie and ugliness, idle hate, and impotent love. It arose from my looking at these manifestations from my lofty station of pride. I saw, too, why that disgust gave way when I descended into the crowd, namely, because wisdom's proper place is the ground, not the sky,—to be among men, not above them; and I saw, that once looked at thus from the proper standpoint, all qualities, good and bad, are nicely adjusted, the one to help or set off the other. (§ 109) And so I learned that we must give up fuming after an impossible ideal, and welcome what we find actually is (§ 110)—Is, that is, for the hour; for something in my mind suggested next that not only then, at the moment of my dream, but always and ceaselessly, change was at work on the buildings that seemed so eternal. In my dream, temples of religion towered and sank to make way for other fanes, that seemed to grow up from within the old, and though different from the prime aim of God, whose houses they were, satisfied the generation for whose need they arose. The buildings so changing all around, at any rate serve the purpose of making men look up at, through, or over them, and not down at the pavement. (§ 111) But were they only temples that so rose and fell? Seats of science surely

also rose and fell, nay, were lost twice in a lifetime of three-score years and ten. (§ 112) But though they were always disappearing, and new ones appearing, religion had always her temple. (§ 113) And the one voice which spoke lastingly, said, "Truth, though stationed herself on a rock, builds on sand, and so her work decays, and so she builds afresh. Nothing is permanent, except truth. She is, and will have men know she must exist, thrusting herself on them by each such attempt (of building) to live with them." What truth does, is work, lasting or not. In the end there will be truth, absolute,-changing no more in manifestation, no more needing to work. (§ 114) Meantime, her building goes on, one sort of building or another bides its time, and has its use. (§ 115) But, said I in my dream, let us leave watching the change ceaselessly at work on the greater buildings, and look at the fabrics built in between them-fabrics less costly, less rare, but essential to this fair of the world, which they help to keep in bounds, instruct, and regulate. Booths, stalls, and shops, were there (§ 116); History, Morality, Art of all kinds, bade for customers. (§ 117) (But art, with its capricious changes of mood, make the larger changes seem like stability.)

(§ 118) And now again the same voice said, "All is change, but all is really permanence." (§ 119) And as one sees in a sunset the varied; shapes of cloud and mountain become simple and definite, from being manifold and multiform,—as the contrasting lives and strifes in the cloud shapes cease their battle quelled by one cloud, and blend in the blank severity of death and peace into a shape befitting the close of day,heaven's repose over earth's strife—(§ 120) so in my dream the change seemed to be arrested. Each building melted into each; and gradually the whole seemed to blend into a common shape, and become unity in the place of multiformity. And what shape, think you, did they seem to blend into? (§ 121) Here is an apt illustration in Nature,—this Druid monument I have brought you to see. (§ 122) Explore its passages the further you go the less you will like it, for at the end of them you meet with the dread shape of a cross, to explain whose existence here learning spends labour, only to leave the question obscure. Whence came it? We do not know. (§ 123) Learning will help to answer this question as much as, and no more than, ignorance. The cross raised here before Christianity existed, makes an ignorant man recoil for what could the symbol mean in those old days? The peasant's tradition is, "People built this building, cross and all, soon after earth was made, to keep them in mind—(1) that earth was made (built) by somebody, did not make itself; (2) that that somebody stays, while we and earth change; (3) that we must therefore make the most of this life, since we live it in His presence. As to that great stone pillar lying in

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the grass, there were stories about it, which, with the tradition I have named, the Church tried to destroy by saying: 'That stone is no more now than Jacob's stone is on which he dreamed his dream; it was a means, —it is not an end.' But the more the Church preached, the more the peasantry clung to their tradition, thinking that what once a thing had a right to mean, it still must mean. They prefer the rude character of the ancient story, uneffaced by the pen flourishes of the modern scribes, and their comment. As, that is, the tradition about the whole Druidical monument had, as shown above, gained hold of people's minds, so the stories about this stone pillar (a part of the monument) held their ground also, having the same tendency as the tradition, viz. to teach simple obedience to simple laws. Therefore the stories about the pillar held their ground against the Church's words: for there stood the stone, immovable (able to give real doctrine if it pleased), amid the fleeting beauties of spring and summer. So as long as that great stone pillar stood upright, the peasants continued to observe and enjoy the tradition left about it, as being more heartening than the frothier utterances of the Church. At last the Church ordered it to be levelled flat, and even said that it was only the primitive form of the churchspire."

(§ 124) To the shape of this primeval Druid monument it was that, in my dream, I saw all buildings resolved. Grander far was the simple Druid temple in my dream than the temples which lately had looked so solid it seemed that after all strife of sects in religion, mankind would return to one simple faith,-the belief in God, and our duty to Him, as formulated in the peasant's tale. And yet, the simplicity of that Druid monument said no more to me, than (as those many-shaped temples and buildings had said), "all is change but permanence too": change, i. e. falsehood, and truth, i. e. permanence. Each soul works through the shows of sense, which continually change, are false (though they seem. the truth), up to its complementary soul: through these fleeting changes it lives, and gradually learning wherein they are false, sees through them the true soul it seeks, which at length it reaches, and finds to be "God, man, or both together mixed." Let only the soul look up, not down; love, not hate; it will see in each change, or falseness, in which truth successively shows itself, the latest presentment of truth: this continually new presentment of truth under successive shapes, tempts the soul upwards, still making it think it has found the actual truth, and keeps on so tempting, until, learning by its successive failures, that for the sake of the soul's development, truth is forced to manifest itself in falsehood, the soul at the happy moment finds skill to discover the truth under its enwrapping falsehood: and to abhor the false, which h ́ BROWNING, 2.

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