and the reality of crossing the prairie in old days came back on me. That halt in the cup of the hills was our limit; it was a moment of life, an arrival, an end.

The sun was too low for further adventuring. We struck due west on as straight a course as the rugged country permitted, thinking to reach the Looking-glass creek, along which lay the beaten road of travel back to mankind. An hour or two passed, and we saw a house in the distance to which we drove,—a humble house, sod-built, like that we had made our nooning in. We drove to the door, and called; it was long before any answer came; but at last a woman opened the door, her face and figure the very expression of dulled toil, hard work, bodily despair. Alone on that prairie, one would have thought she would have welcomed a human countenance; but she looked on us as if she wished we would be gone, and hardly answered to our question of the road. She was the type of the abandonment of human life. I did not speak to her; but I see her now, as I saw her then, with a kind of surprise that a woman could come to be, by human life, like that. There was no one else in the house; and she shut the door upon us after one sullen look and one scant sentence, as if we, and any other, were naught, and went back to her silence in that green waste, now gilded by the level sun, miles on miles. I have often thought of her since, and what life was to her there, and found some image of other solitudes—and men and women in them—as expansive, as alienating as the wild prairie, where life hides itself, grows dehumanized, and dies.

We drove on, with some word of this; and, eating what we had with us in case of famine, made our supper from biscuit and flask; and, before darkness fell, we struck the creek road, and turned southward,—a splendour of late sunset gleaming over the untravelled western bank, and dying out in red bloom and the purple of slow star-dawning overhead; and on we drove, with a hard road under us, having far to go. At the first farmhouse we watered the willing ponies, who had long succumbed to our control, and who went as if they could not tire, steadily and evenly, under the same strong hand and kindly voice they had felt day-long. It was then I took the reins for an easy stretch, giving my friend a change, and felt what so unobservably he had been doing all day with wrist and eye, while he listened. So we drove down, and knew the moon was up by the changed heavens, though yet unseen behind the bluffs of the creek upon our left; and far away southward, in the evening light, lay the long valley like a larger river. We still felt the upland, however, as a loftier air; and always as, when night comes, nature exercises some mysterious magic of the dark hour in strange places, there, as all day long, we seemed to draw closer to earth—not earth as it is in landscape, a thing of beauty and colour and human kinship, but earth, the soil, the element, the globe.

This was in both our minds, and I had thought of it before he spoke after a long pause over the briar pipes that had comraded our talk since morning. "I can't talk of it now," he said; "it's gone into me in an hour that you have been years in thinking; but that is what you are to us." I say the things he said, for I cannot otherwise give his way, and that trust of love in which these thoughts were born on my lips; all those years, in many a distant place, I had thought for him almost as much as for myself. "You knighted us," he said, "and we fight your cause,"—not knowing that kingship, however great or humble, is but the lowly knights made one in him who by God's grace can speak the word. "I have no doubt it's true, what you say; but it is different. I expected it would be; but we used to speak of nature more than the soul, and of nature's being a guide. Poor Robin, I remember, began with that." "There is a sonnet of Arnold's you know," I answered, "that tells another tale. But I did not learn it from him. And, besides, what else he has to say is not cheerful. Nothing is wise," I interjected, "that is not cheerful."

But without repeating the wandering talk of reality with its changeful tones,—and however serious the matter might be it was never far from a touch of lightness shuttling in and out like sunshine,—I told him, as we drove down the dark valley, my hand resting now on his shoulder near me, how nature is antipodal to the soul; or, if not the antipodes, is apart from us, and cares not for the virtues we have erected, for authority and mercy, for justice, chastity, and sacrifice, for nothing that is man's except the life of the body itself, the race-life, as if man were a chemical element or a wave-motion of ether that are parts of physics. "I convinced myself," I said, "that the soul is not a term in the life of nature, but that nature is in it as a physical vigour and to it an outward spectacle, whereby the soul acquires a preparation for immortality, whether immortality come or not. And I have sometimes thought," I continued, "that on the spiritual side an explanation of the inequalities of human conditions, both past and present, may be contained in the idea that for all alike, lowly and lofty, wretched and fortunate, simple and learned, life remains in all its conditions an opportunity to know God and exercise the soul in virtue, and is an education of the soul in all its essential knowledge and faculties, at least within Christian times, broadly speaking, and in more than one pagan civilization. Material success, fame, wealth, and power—birth even, with all it involves of opportunity and fate—are insignificant, if the soul's life is thus secured. I do not mean that such a thought clears the mystery of the different lots of mankind; but it suggests another view of the apparent injustice of the world in its most rigid forms. This, however, is a wandering thought. The great reversal of the law of nature in the soul lies in the fact that whereas she proceeds by the selfish will of the strongest trampling out the weak, spiritual law requires the best to sacrifice itself for the least. Scientific ethics, which would chloroform the feeble, can never succeed until the race makes bold to amend what it now receives as the mysterious ways of heaven, and identifies a degenerate body with a dead soul. Such a code is at issue with true democracy, which requires that every soul, being equal in value in view of its unknown future, shall receive the benefit of every doubt in earthly life, and be left as a being in the hands of the secret power that ordained its existence in the hour when nature was constituted to be its mode of birth, consciousness, and death. And if the choice must be made on the broad scale, it is our practical faith that the service of the best, even to the point of death, is due to the least in the hope of bettering the lot of man. Hence, as we are willing that in communities the noblest should die for a cause, we consent to the death of high civilizations, if they spread in some Hellenization of a Roman, some Romanizing of a barbaric world; and to the extinction of aristocracies, if their virtues thereby are disseminated and the social goods they monopolized made common in a people; and to the falling of the flower of man's spirit everywhere, if its seeds be sown on all the winds of the future for the blessing of the world's fuller and more populous life. Such has been the history of our civilization, and still is, and must be till the whole earth's surface be conquered for mankind, embodied in its highest ideals, personal and social. This is not nature's way, who raises her trophy over the slain; our trophy is man's laurel upon our grave. So, everywhere except in the physical sphere of life, if you would find the soul's commands, reverse nature's will. This superiority to nature, as it seems to me, this living in an element plainly antithetical to her sphere, is a sign of 'an ampler ether, a diviner air.'"

So I spoke, as the words came to me, while we were still driving down the dark valley, in deeper shadows, under higher bluffs, looking out on a levelled world westward, stretching off with low, white, wreathing mists and moonlit distances of plains beyond the further bunk. We turned a great shoulder of the hills, and the moon shone out bright and clear, riding in heaven; and the southward reach unlocked, and gave itself for miles to our eyes. At the instant, while the ponies came back upon their haunches at the drop of the long descent ahead, we both cried out, "the Looking-glass!" There it was, about a mile away before and below us, as plain as a pikestaff,—a silvery reach, like a long narrow lake, smooth as the floor of cloud seen from above among mountains, silent, motionless,—for all the world like an immense, spectral looking-glass, set there in the half-darkened waste. It was evidently what gave the name to the creek, and I have since noticed the same name elsewhere in the Western country, and I suppose the phenomenon is not uncommon. For an hour or more it remained; we never seemed to get nearer to it; it was an eerie thing—the earth-light of the moon on that side,—I saw it all the time.

"The difference you spoke of," I began, with my eyes upon that spectral pool, "is only that change which belongs to life, dissolving like illusion, but not itself illusion. I am not aware of any break; it is the old life in a higher form with clearer selfhood. Life, in the soul especially, seems less a state of being than a thing of transformation, whose successive shapes we wear; and so far as that change is self-determined," I continued, making almost an effort to think, so weird was that scene before us, "the soul proceeds by foreknowledge of itself in the ideal, and wills the change by ideal living, which is not a conflict with the actual but a process out of it, conditioned in almost a Darwinian way on that brain-futuring which entered into the struggle for animal existence even with such enormous modifying power. In our old days, under the sway of new scientific knowledge, we instinctively saw man in the perspective of nature, and then man seemed almost an after-thought of nature; but having been produced, late in her material history, and gifted with foresight that distinguished him from all else in her scheme, his own evolution gathered thereby that speed which is so perplexing a contrast to the inconceivable slowness of the orbing of stars and the building of continents. He has used his powers of prescience for his own ends; but, fanciful as the thought is, might it happen that through his control of elemental forces and his acquaintance with infinite space, he should reach the point of applying prescience in nature's own material frame, and wield the world for the better accomplishment of her apparent ends,—that, though unimaginable now, would constitute the true polarity to her blind and half-chaotic motions,—chaotic in intelligence, I mean, and to the moral reason. Unreal as such a thought is, a glimpse of some such feeling toward nature is discernible in the work of some impressionist landscape painters, who present colour and atmosphere and space without human intention, as a kind of artistry of science, having the same sort of elemental substance and interest that scientific truth has as an object of knowledge,—a curious form of the beauty of truth."

We spoke of some illustrations of this, the scene before us lending atmosphere and suggestion to the talk, and enforcing it like nature's comment. "But," I continued, "what I had in mind to say was concerning our dead selves. The old phrase, life is a continual dying, is true, and, once gone life is death; and sometimes so much of it has been gathered to the past, such definite portions of it are laid away, that we can look, if we will, in the lake of memory on the faces of the dead selves which once we were." Instinctively we looked on the mystic glamour in the low valley, as on that Lake of the Dead Souls I spoke of. I went on after the natural pause,—I could not help it,—"'I was a different man, then,' we say, with a touch of sadness, perhaps, but often with better thoughts, and always with a feeling of mystery. How old is the youth before he is aware of the fading away of vitality out of early beliefs? and then he feels the quick passing of the enthusiasms of opening life, as one cause after another, one hero, one poet, disclosing the great interests of life, in turn engages his heart. As time goes on, and life comes out in its true perspective, one thing with another, and he discovers the incompleteness of single elements of ardour in the whole of life, and also the defects of wisdom, art, and action in those books and men that had won his full confidence and what he called perfect allegiance, there comes often a moment of pause, as if this growth had in it some thing irrational and derogatory. The thinkers whose words of light and leading were the precious truth itself, the poets he idolized, the elders he trusted, fall away, and others stand in their places, who better appeal to his older mind, his finer impulses, his sounder judgment; and what true validity can these last have in the end? After a decade he can almost see his youth as something dead, his early manhood as something that will die. The poet, especially, who gives expression to himself, and puts his life at its period into a book, feels, as each work drops from his hand, that it is a portion of a self that is dead, though it was life in the making; and so with the embodiments of life in action, the man looks back on past greatness, past romance; for all life, working itself out—desire into achievement—dies to the man. Vital life lies always before. It is a strange thought that only by the death of what we now are, can we enter into our own hopes and victories; that it is by the slaying of the self which now is that the higher self takes life; that it is through such self-destruction that we live. The intermediate state seems a waste, and the knowledge that it is intermediate seems to impair its value; but this is the way ordained by which we must live, and such is life's magic that in each stage, from childhood to age, it is lived with trustfulness in itself. It is needful only, however much we outlive, to live more and better, and through all to remain true to the high causes, the faithful loves, the sacred impulses, that have given our imperfect life of the past whatever of nobility it may have; so shall death forever open into life. But," I ended, lifting my moist eyes toward the sweep of the dark slopes, "the wind blows, and leaves the mystic to inquire whence and whither, the wild shrub blossoms and only the poet is troubled to excuse its beauty, and happy is he who can live without too much thought of life."

The sheen of the river had died out, and the creek was only a common stream lit with the high moon, and bordered far off to the west with the low indistinguishable country. We drove in silence down the valley along that shelf of road under the land. The broken bluffs on the left rose into immense slopes of rolling prairie, and magnified by the night atmosphere into majesty, heavy with deep darkness in their folds, stood massive and vast in the dusk moonlight, like a sea. Then fell on me and grew with strange insistence the sense of this everlasting mounded power of the earth, like the rise and subsidence of ocean in an element of slower and more awful might. The solid waste began to loom and lift, almost with the blind internal strength of the whirl of the planet through space. Deeper into the shadow we plunged with every echoing tread of the hoofs. The lair of some mysterious presence was about us,—unshaped, unrealized, as in some place of antique awe before the time of temples or of gods. It seemed a corporal thing. If I stretched out my hand I should touch it like the ground. It came out from all the black rifts, it rolled from the moonlit distinct heights, it filled the chill air,—it was an envelopment—it would be an engulfment—horse and man we were sinking in it. Then it was—most in all my days—that I felt dense mystery overwhelming me. "O infinite earth," I thought, "our unknowing mother, our unknowing grave!"—"What is it?" he said, feeling my wrist straighten where it lay on his shoulder, and the tremor and the hand seeking him. Was it a premonition? "Nothing," I answered, and did not tell him; but he began to cheer me with lighter talk, and win me back to the levels of life, and under his sensitive and loving ways, the excitement of the ride died out, and an hour later, after midnight, we drove into the silent town. We put the ponies up, praising them with hand and voice; and then he took both my hands in his and said, "The truest thing you ever said was what you wrote me, 'We live each others' lives.'" That was his thanks.

O brave and tender heart, now long lapped under the green fold of that far prairie in his niche of earth! How often I see him as in our first days,—the boy of seventeen summers, lying on his elbows over his Thackeray, reading by the pictures, and laughing to himself hour after hour; and many a prairie adventure, many happy days and fortunate moments come back, with the strength and bloom of youth, as I recall the manly figure, the sensitive and eager face, and all his resolute ways. Who of us knows what he is to another? He could not know how much his life entered into mine, and still enters. But he is dead; and I have set down these weak and stammering words of the life we began together, not for the strong and sure, but for those who, though true hearts, find it hard to lay hold of truth, and doubt themselves, in the hope that some younger comrade of life, though unknown, may make them of avail and find in them the dark leading of a hand.