know that they have gone from mudbank and murky town back to the
free airs of their inheritance, to the shadow of sun-swept cliffs
and the curling crest of the wind-beaten waves, to brood again over
the great ocean of a world's tears.

My little tree is gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of
promise. The sparrows busied with nest-building in the
neighbouring pipes and gutters use it for a vantage ground, and
crowd there in numbers, each little beak sealed with long golden
straw or downy feather.

The river is heavy with hay barges, the last fruits of winter's
storehouse; the lengthening days slowly and steadily oust the dark;
the air is loud with a growing clamour of life: spring is not only
proclaimed, but on this Feast she is crowned, and despite the
warring wind the days bring their meed of sunshine. We stand for a
moment at the meeting of the ways, the handclasp of Winter and
Spring, of Sleep and Wakening, of Life and Death; and there is
between them not even the thin line which Rabbi Jochanan on his
death-bed beheld as all that divided hell from heaven.

"Sphaera cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibus," was said
of Mercury, that messenger of the gods who marshalled reluctant
spirits to the Underworld; and for Mercury we may write Life with
Death as its great sacrament of brotherhood and release, to be
dreaded only as we dread to partake unworthily of great benefits.
Like all sacraments it has its rightful time and due solemnities;
the horror and sin of suicide lie in the presumption of free will,
the forestalling of a gift,--the sin of Eve in Paradise, who took
that which might only be given at the hand of the Lord. It has too