beside you is the Presence of HOME; that ineffable, sheltering, loving
Presence, which amidst solitude murmurs "not solitary,"--a Presence
unvouchsafed to the great lady in the palace she has left. And the lady
herself? She is resting on the rude gnarled root-stump from which the
vagrant had risen; she has drawn Sophy towards her; she has taken the
child's hand; she is speaking now, now listening; and on her face
kindness looks like happiness. Perhaps she is happy that moment. And
Waife? he is turning aside his weatherbeaten mobile countenance with his
hand anxiously trembling upon the young scholar's arm. The scholar
whispers, "Are you satisfied with me?" and Waife answers in a voice as
low but more broken, "God reward you! Oh, joy! if my pretty one has
found at last a woman friend!" Poor vagabond, he has now a calm asylum,
a fixed humble livelihood; more than that, he has just achieved an object
fondly cherished. His past life,--alas! what has he done with it? His
actual life, broken fragment though it be, is at rest now. But still the
everlasting question,--mocking terrible question, with its phrasing of
farce and its enigmas of tragical sense,--"WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?" Do
with what? The all that remains to him, the all he holds! the all which
man himself, betwixt Free-will and Pre-decree, is permitted to do. Ask
not the vagrant alone: ask each of the four there assembled on that
flying bridge called the Moment. Time before thee,--what wilt thou do
with it? Ask thyself! ask the wisest! Out of effort to answer that
question, what dream-schools have risen, never wholly to perish,--the
science of seers on the Chaldee's Pur-Tor, or in the rock-caves of
Delphi, gasped after and grasped at by horn-handed mechanics to-day in
their lanes and alleys. To the heart of the populace sink down the
blurred relics of what once was the law of the secretest sages,
hieroglyphical tatters which the credulous vulgar attempt to interpret.
"WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?" Ask Merle and his Crystal! But the curtain
descends! Yet a moment, there they are,--age and childhood,--poverty,