Ideala | Page 2

and dislike are antechambers to either, we possess the
key to joy and sorrow, by which alone we can attain to the mystery that
may not be mentioned here, but beyond which ecstasy awaits us.
This is why such details are necessary.
Doctors-spiritual must face the horrors of the dissecting-room, and
learn before they can cure or teach; and even we, poor feeble creatures,
who have no strength, however great our desire, to do either, can help
at least a little by not hindering, if we attend to our own mental health,
which we shall do all the better for knowing something of our moral
anatomy, and the diseases to which it is liable. We hate and despise in
our ignorance, and grow weak; but love and pity thrive on knowledge,
and to love and pity we owe all the beauty of life, and all our highest

power.
_"It is that life of custom and accident in which many of us pass much
of our time in this world; that life in which we do what we have not
purposed, and speak what we do not mean, and assent to what we do
not understand; that life which is overlaid by the weight of things
external to it, and is moulded by them, instead of assimilating them;
that which, instead of growing and blossoming under any wholesome
dew, is crystallised over with it, as with hoar frost, and becomes to the
true life what an arborescence is to a tree, a candied agglomeration of
thoughts and habits foreign to it, brittle, obstinate, and icy, which can
neither bend nor grow, but must be crushed and broken to bits if it
stands in our way. All men are liable to be in some degree frost-bitten
in this sort; all are partly encumbered and crusted over with idle matter;
only, if they have real life in them, they are always breaking this bark
away in noble rents, until it becomes, like the black strips upon the
birch tree, only a witness of their own inward strength."_ --RUSKIN.

IDEALA

CHAPTER I.
She came among us without flourish of trumpets. She just slipped into
her place, almost unnoticed, but once she was settled there it seemed as
if we had got something we had wanted all our lives, and we should
have missed her as you would miss the thrushes in the spring, or any
other sweet familiar thing. But what the secret of her charm was I
cannot say. She was full of inconsistencies. She disliked ostentation,
and never wore those ornamental fidgets ladies delight in, but she
would take a piece of priceless lace to cover her head when she went to
water her flowers. And she said rings were a mistake; if your hands
were ugly they drew attention to them, if pretty they hid their beauty;
yet she wore half-a-dozen worthless ones habitually for the love of
those who gave them, to her. It was said that she was striking in
appearance, but cold and indifferent in manner. Some, on whom she
had never turned her eyes, called her repellent. But it was noticed that
men who took her down to dinner, or had any other opportunity of
talking to her, were never very positive in, what they said of her

afterwards. She made every one, men and women alike, feel, and she
did it unconsciously. Without effort, without eccentricity, without
anything you could name or define, she impressed you, and she held
you --or at least she held me, always--expectant. Nothing about her ever
seemed to be of the present. When she talked she made you wonder
what her past had been, and when she was silent you began to speculate
about her future. But she did not talk much as a rule, and when she did
speak it was always some subject of interest, some fact that she wanted
to ascertain accurately, or some beautiful idea, that occupied her; she
had absolutely no small talk for any but her most intimate friends,
whom she was wont at times to amuse with an endless stock of
anecdotes and quaint observations; and this made people of limited
capacity hard on her. Some of these called her a cold, ambitious,
unsympathetic woman; and perhaps, from their point of view, she was
so. She certainly aspired to something far above them, and had nothing
but scorn for the dead level of dull mediocrity from which they would
not try to rise.
"To be distinguished among these people," she once said, "it is only
necessary to have one's heart
Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love.
There is no need to do anything; if you have the right feeling you may
be as passive as a