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"I dare not publicly name the rare joys," he says, "the infinite delights, that intoxicate me on some sweet June morning when the river and bay are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping it up with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after me, like those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam still shining for many a long rood behind me.... To take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean, lying there, moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor in the desert could not seem more remote from life, the cool breeze on one's forehead, ... why should I tell of these things!"

It is the common and the god-like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us the love of an ideal; strive like us like us are tempted to grow weary of the struggle to do well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support, returns of courage; and are condemned like us to be crucified between that double law of the members and the will.

But the dawn-wind caught up that "hush" and carried it to the trees and undergrowth about them, and then ran thousand-footed before them to whisper it to the valley where they were going. And Miriam, knowing the worship and protection in his delicate caress, looked up into his face and smiled and the smile in her grey eyes was that ancient mother-smile which is coeval with life.