“Who carry music in their heart

Through dusty lane and wrangling¹ mart,

Plying² their daily task with busier feet,

Because their secret souls a holier strain repeat.”

It would be interesting to have the statistics of what number, out of all the human stream that pours into the city every morning coming to their work, are singing inwardly.

 

How many are thinking tunefully? How many are moving rhythmically³? And how many are going, as dead drays and carts, rumbling⁴ lifelessly to their tasks?

 

47

It is good that the greater part of the world is in love. For love is the Song of Songs. To the young lover Nature is transformed. Some Ithuriel has touched the deadly commonplace; all is miraculous⁵. The moon, the dead companion to our earth, the pale and washed-out pilgrim of the sky, has been changed into a silver-fronted fairy whose beams thrill him with a heady enchantment⁶. Every breeze has its secret. The woods, the houses, all men and women are notes of that sweet harmony that fills him.

 

“Orpheus with his lute⁷ made trees,

And the mountain tops that freeze,

Bow their heads when he did sing.”

Every man is an Orpheus, so he but carry about in him an inward melody. There is for him “a new heaven and a new earth.”

 

This world is an insolvable puzzle to human reason. It is full of the most absurd 48 antinomies, the most distressing⁸ cruelties, the most amazing contradictions. No wonder men’s minds take refuge in stubborn stoicism, in agnosticism, in blank unfaith.

 

There is no intellectual faith, no rational

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