nearer and nearer to the silent sea of eternity, even then it seems as
if we heard from afar their rush and roar. We feel that the life-force
which yet remains and impels us onward still has its source and supply
from those cataracts.

School time was ended, the first fleeting years of university life were
over, and many beautiful life-dreams were over also. But one of them
still remained: Faith in God and man. Otherwise life would have been
circumscribed within one's narrow brain. Instead of that, a nobler
consecration had preserved all, and even the painful and
incomprehensible events of life became a proof to me of the
omnipresence of the divine in the earthly. "The least important thing
does not happen except as God wills it." This was the brief
life-wisdom I had accumulated.

During the summer holidays I returned to my little native city. What
joy in these meetings again! No one has explained it, but in this
seeing and finding again, and in these self-memories, lie the real
secrets of all joy and pleasure. What we see, hear or taste for the
first time may be beautiful, grand and agreeable, but it is too new.
It overpowers, but gives no repose, and the fatigue of enjoying is
greater than the enjoyment itself. To hear again, years afterward, an
old melody, every note of which we supposed we had forgotten, and yet
to recognize it as an old acquaintance; or, after the lapse of many
years, to stand once more before the Sistine Madonna at Dresden, and
experience afresh all the emotions which the infinite look of the child
aroused in us for years; or to smell a flower or taste a dish again
which we have not thought of since childhood--all these produce such an
intense charm that we do not know which we enjoy most, the actual
pleasure or the old memory. So when we return again, after long