could sway and mould the world, in later years I have come to see
that the strongest and fiercest characters are only the river-
wrack, the broken boughs, the torn grasses that whirl and spin in
the tongue of the creeping flood, and that there is a dim
resistless force behind them that marches on unheeding and drives
them in the forefront of the inundation. Things that had seemed
drearily theoretical, dry, axiomatic, platitudinal, showed
themselves to be great generalizations from a torrent of human
effort and mortal endeavour. And thus all the mass of detail and
human relation that had been rudely set aside by the insolent
prejudices of youth under the generic name of business, came slowly
to have an intense and living significance. I cannot trace the
process in detail; but I became aware of the fulness, the energy,
the matchless interest of the world, and the vitality of a hundred
thoughts that had seemed to me the dreariest abstractions.

Then, too, the greatest gain of all, there comes a sort of
patience. In youth mistakes seemed irreparable, calamities
intolerable, ambitions realizable, disappointments unbearable. An
anxiety hung like a dark impenetrable cloud, a disappointment
poisoned the springs of life. But now I have learned that mistakes
can often be set right, that anxieties fade, that calamities have
sometimes a compensating joy, that an ambition realized is not
always pleasurable, that a disappointment is often of itself a
great incentive to try again. One learns to look over troubles,
instead of looking into them; one learns that hope is more
unconquerable than grief. And so there flows into the gap the
certainty that one can make more of misadventures, of unpromising
people, of painful experiences, than one had ever hoped. It may not
be, nay, it is not, so eager, so full-blooded a spirit; but it is a