for doing useful work; but it brings an altogether different introduction when it knocks at the door of our hearts. Beauty, then, is its only recommendation. At one place it comes as a prisoner, and at another, as a free thing. How then should we give credit to its first introduction and disbelieve the second one? That the flower has got its being in the unbroken chain of causation, is true beyond doubt; but that is an outer truth. The inner truth is: 'Anandadhyéva Khalvimáni bhutáni, jáyanté,'-verily from the everlasting joy all objects have their birth.

A flower, therefore, has not its only function in Nature, but has another great function to exercise in the mind of man. And what is that function? In Nature, its work is that of a slave who has to make his appearance at appointed times, but in the heart of man, it comes like a messenger from the King. In the Ramayana, when Sita, forcibly separated from her husband, was bewailing her evil fate in Rávana's golden palace, she was met by a messenger who brought with him a ring of Rámchandra himself. The very sight of it convinced Sita of the truth of the tidings he bore. She was at once reassured that he came indeed from her beloved one, who had not forgotten her and who was at hand to rescue her.

Such a messenger is a flower from our Great Lover. Surrounded with the pomp and pageantry of worldliness which may be likened to this golden city of Ravan, we still live in exile, and there the insolent spirit of worldly prosperity tempts us with allurements and claims us as its own bride. In the mean time comes the flower across, with the message from the other shore, and whispers in our ears, 'I am come. He has sent me I am a messenger of the Beautiful, the one whose soul is the bliss of love. This island of isolation has been bridged over by Him, and He

has not forgotten thee and will rescue thee even now. He will draw thee unto Him and make thee his own. This illusion will not hold thee in thralldom forever.'

If we happen to be awake then, we question him: 'How are we to know that thou art come from Him indeed!' The messenger says, 'Look! I have this ring from Him. How lovely are its hues and charm!'

Ah, of course. It is his indeed our wedding ring. Now all else passes into oblivion, only this sweet symbol of the touch of the Eternal love fills us with a deep longing. We realize that the palace of gold where we are is not all our deliverance is outside it; and there, our love has its fruition and our life has its fulfillment.

What to the bee, in Nature, are merely color and scent and the marks or spots to know the right track to honey, are to the human heart, beauty and joy untrammeled by necessity. They bring a love-letter to the heart, written in colored inks.

I was telling you, therefore, that however busy our active Nature outwardly may be, she has a secret passage within the heart, where she comes and goes freely, without any design whatsoever. There, the fire of her workshop is transformed into lamps of a festival, the noise of her factory is heard like music. The iron chain of cause and effect sounds heavily outside in Nature, but in the human heart, its unalloyed delight seems to play, as it were, on the golden strings of a harp.

This, indeed, seems to be wonderful, that Nature has these two aspects at one and the same time, so antithetical -one being of thralldom and the other of freedom. In the same form, sound, color and taste, two contrary notes are heard, one of necessity and the other of joy. Outwardly, Nature is busy and restless, inwardly she is all silence and

peace. She has toil on one side and leisure on the other. You see her bondage only when you see her from without, but within her heart is a limitless beauty.

At this very moment, when this rainfall resounds in the sky of the evening, it hides from us its aspect of action. In this silent meeting of darkness, it throws no hint of its busy mission of supplying each blade of grass and each leaf of the tree with their nourishment. It descends to our heart, leaving off its office dress, to entertain us with music, to please the poet in us. Hence, in the tune of the rainfall, this plaintive note overspreads the sky:

The night is dark, and the gloom hangs thick everywhere,

Ceaseless is the lightning's dart. Says the poet, How shouldst thou pass thy time When parted from thy Lord thou art!

Indeed, this message must be made known to us, that we live in separation from our Lord. For the pain of separation and the joy of meeting are closely connected. As smoke may be called the beginning of the flame, so the former may be called the preparation of the latter.

But who bears the news to us? Why, they whom your science takes as galley slaves in the great prison-house of Nature's law where they are fettered in chains one with another, and are made to toil night and day, mute figures they, and none but they, deliver to us the tidings. When the sound of their fetters penetrates into our hearts, we discover in it the song of parting from

the Beloved, or rather, the glad music of welcome of the meeting with Him. Such messages as can never be given in words are whispered by them secretly to us, and are woven partly into rhyme and partly into words in the poetry of man, who sings:

Fast falls the rain, 't is the month of August And the wedding chamber of my heart is dark and desolate!

To-day this feeling ever recurs to my mind, that these rains are not of one single evening but an unceasing shower pouring from all my life. So far as my vision goes, a deep darkness of an everlasting evening of my lovelorn, sad and solitary soul, shrouds, in thick folds, all my life; there, surrounding the faroff bounding lines of the earth and the sky, hour goes after hour in the untiring and ceaseless fall of rains, and the whole sky is loud with this strain: 'How could'st thou pass thy weary nights and days, when parted from thy Lord thou art!'

Still, through this pain of separation a deep sweetness secretly wells up, a fragrance from an unknown blossoming woodland wafts hither to us an ineffable breath of love. The very anguish of my heart ever repeats to my ear, 'He is. Surely He is.'

Where this life-long isolation of mine begins, there He is, and where it will have its end one day, there He waits. And now in the midway He plays so sweetly upon his lute, keeping Himself ever out of sight. Oh, how to pass my nights and days without Him, that Lord of mine own innermost soul!

HUMAN nature is full of contradictions, which give it much of its charm. But the character and career of Alexander H. Stephens seem to involve contradictions beyond the share of most of us.

In physique he was abnormally frail, delicate, and sensitive; nervous sometimes to the point of hysteria; yet he had the spirit of a gamecock, was ready for a duel when honor required it, walked right up and struck a far bigger man who had insulted him and who nearly murdered him in consequence. Perhaps with some braggadocio, but with more truth, he said of himself: 'I am afraid of nothing on earth, or above the earth, or under the earth, but to do wrong.'

He was studious by nature, longed for quiet, and solitude, and meditation. Yet he lived in a perpetual whirl, either drawn by a thousand activities abroad, or beset by a throng of visitors at home. 'I supposed when I got this room I should be by myself, . . . but I do nothing the livelong day but jabber with each transient interloper who may be disposed to give me a call.'

He was one of the most logical, clearheaded, determined defenders of slavery and of the thorough subordination of black to white. Yet few men have been more sensitively humane, more tenderly sympathetic with suffering in either white or black. The Negroes loved him, and on one occasion

after the war three thousand freedmen gathered on his lawn and serenaded him with passionate admiration and devotion.

No man was more bitterly opposed to secession and to the war than he was. No Southerner made a harder or more nearly successful fight to prevent the withdrawal of his state. Yet when Georgia went, he not only went with her, but became the vice-president of the Confederacy. He himself puts this contrast vividly in his diary written while a prisoner at Fort Warren in 1865. 'How strange it seems to me that I should thus suffer. I who did everything in my power to prevent [the war] . . . On the fourth of September, 1848, I was near losing my life for resenting the charge of being a traitor to the South, and now I am here, a prisoner, under charge, I suppose, of being a traitor to the Union. In all, I have done nothing but what I thought was right.'

Nor does this sum up the list of Stephens's contradictions. The second officer of the Confederacy and a devoted champion of its cause, he was yet persistently opposed to the conduct of the government from beginning to end. He opposed Davis's financial policy, he opposed conscription, he opposed martial law, he considered that the president's whole course was dictated either by gross misjudgment or by a belief in the necessity of dictatorial

power. And here we have, I think, a rather piquant attitude for a man who held the next to the highest place in a new-born nation fighting for life and death.

These considerations make the vicepresident, if not the greatest, certainly the most curious and interesting figure in the lightning-lit panorama of Confederate history.

In analyzing Stephens's career, the question of health, negatively important for most leaders of men, becomes enormously positive. From his birth in 1812 to his death in 1883, his life seems to have been a long disease, forever on the verge of terminating fatally. It may be that the rough experiences of pioneer farming in his childhood - the corn-dropping, the sheep-tending, exposure, hardship-injured him permanently, or saved him, who knows? So with the long, desperate battle for an education and a profession, in solitude and poverty. The battle may have weakened, may have toughened, perhaps both.

At any rate, we rarely hear of him except as suffering. All the descriptions of him emphasize some phase of physical weakness and inadequacy. His own account at twenty-one sets the note (the arithmetic is somewhat peculiar): 'My weight is ninety-four pounds, my height sixty-seven inches, my waist twenty-seven inches in circumference, and my whole appearance that of a youth of seventeen or eighteen. When I left college, two years ago, my net weight was seventy pounds. If I continue in a proportionate increase, I shall reach one hundred pounds in about ten years more.'

Later portrayals have sometimes an unkindly touch, as the caustic diatribe of the robust Dick Taylor, no doubt in some points justified: 'Like other ills, feeble health has its compensations, especially for those who unite restless

vanity and ambition to a feminine desire for sympathy. It has been much the habit of Mr. Stephens to date controversial epistles from "a sick chamber," as do ladies in a delicate condition. A diplomat of the last century, the Chevalier d'Eon, by usurping the privileges of the opposite sex, inspired grave doubts concerning his own.'

But most observers seem rather to be impressed with the contrast between the man's physical deficiencies and his splendid spiritual strength. In the height of his congressional career in Washington (1855) a keen-sighted journalist noted that, with the stress of great occasions, 'the poor, sickly, emaciated frame, which looks as if it must sink under the slightest physical exertion, at once grows instinct with a galvanic vitality which quickens every nerve with the energy of a new life, imparts to every feature a high, intellectual expression, makes the languid eyes glow like living coals, and diffuses a glow of reviving animation over the pallid countenance.'

Even more striking is another picture taken in the same place in 1872, after war and imprisonment had done their worst. An immense cloak, a high hat, and peering somewhere out of the middle a thin, pale, sad face. How anything so small and sick and sorrowful could get here all the way from Georgia is a wonder. If he were laid out in his coffin, he need n't look any different, only then the fire would have gone out in the burning eyes. Set as they are in the wax-white face, they seem to burn and blaze. That he is here at all to offer the counsels of moderation and patriotism proves how invincible is the soul that dwells in that sunken frame. He took the modified oath in his chair, and his friends picked him up and carried him off in it as if he were a feather.'

How far this fiery energy of the soul was responsible for the weary failure of

the body, who shall say? But never was man, in mind and spirit, more heartily and vividly and incessantly and at every point alive than Alexander H. Stephens. From childhood he fought his way in the world, fought for education, fought for success as a lawyer, fought for political distinction. He liked fighting. 'I was made to figure in a storm, excited by continual collisions. Discussion and argument are my delight; and a place of life and business therefore is my proper element.. ..I long to be where I shall have an argument daily.'

In age and in prison the fire, indeed, might burn a little low. 'Personal ambition had no part in anything I have done.' But in the early days the man panted to get upward, to do something, to be something. 'I believe I shall never be worth anything, and the thought is death to my soul. I am too boyish, childish, unmanful, trifling, simple in my manners and address.' When he had become something - not enough, never enough - the record of work he did is, for an invalid, quite inexplicable; or rather, it fully explains the invalidism. 'I rise and breakfast at eight; then commence with my mail. Frequently I do not get half through that before I am bored almost to death with calls on business of all sorts; then to the Committee at ten; then to the House at twelve; then to dinner at four; then calls before I leave the table till twelve at night. Then I take up and get through my unfinished reading of letters and newspapers of the morning; and then at one o'clock get to bed. I now have about one hundred letters before me unanswered.'

This petulance, this vivacity, this mad energy of living, in a frame half dead, remind one constantly of Voltaire, who, with his little, weak, and shattered body, went on for fifty years, making enemies and smashing them,

puncturing social rottenness with his fierce wit, blasting others' lies and telling petty lies of his own, sometimes pitiable, sometimes malignant, often fascinating, but always, always splendidly alive. Stephens made few enemies, told no lies, was neither pitiable nor malignant; but he was splendidly alive until the coffin-lid put out the torch that seemed to have exhausted its fuel long before.

But though Voltaire had plenty of physical ills, I find no indication that he ever suffered from melancholy or mental depression. Stephens did. The jar of over-tense nerves mingles curiously with his eager bursts of ambition and aspiration. 'My feelings and hopes seem ever to be vibrating between assurance and despondency. My soul is bent upon success in my profession, and when indulging in brightest anticipations, the most trivial circumstance is frequently sufficient to damp my whole ardor and drive me to despair.'

This tendency to depression was not merely the reaction from disappointed hopes or dreams unrealized. It was a constitutional melancholy which, not only in youth, but even in middle life, seems to have eaten like a canker into the man's very soul. The words in which he describes it most definitely have a strange, poignant bitterness that wrings the heart: 'Sometimes I have thought that of all men I was most miserable; that I was especially doomed to misfortune, to melancholy, to grief. The misery, the deep agony of spirit I have suffered, no mortal knows, nor ever will. . . . The torture of body is severe; I have had my share of that.. But all these are slight when compared with the pangs of an offended or wounded spirit. The heart alone knoweth its own sorrow. I have borne it these many years. I have borne it all my life.'

To his beloved brother, Linton, he endeavors to describe his spiritual mal