Amazon. All their channels were of golden sand, and the golden sunlight
was above and through and in them all: gold and gold met, with the waters
between. And what gave an added life to their motion was, that all the
ripples made shadows on the clear yellow below them. The eye could not
see the rippling on the surface; but the sun saw it, and drew it in
multitudinous shadowy motion upon the sand, with the play of a thousand
fancies of gold burnished and dead, of sunlight and yellow, trembling,
melting, curving, blending, vanishing ever, ever renewed. It was as if all
the water-marks upon a web of golden silk had been set in wildest yet most
graceful curvilinear motion by the breath of a hundred playful zephyrs. My
eye could not be filled with seeing. I stood in speechless delight for a
while, gazing at the "endless ending" which was "the humour of the game,"
and thinking how in all God's works the laws of beauty are wrought out
in evanishment, in birth and death. There, there is no hoarding, but
an ever-fresh creating, an eternal flow of life from the heart of the
All-beautiful. Hence even the heart of man cannot hoard. His brain or his
hand may gather into its box and hoard; but the moment the thing has passed
into the box, the heart has lost it and is hungry again. If man would
_have,_ it is the giver he must have; the eternal, the original, the
ever-outpouring is alone within his reach; the everlasting _creation_ is
his heritage. Therefore all that he makes must be free to come and go
through the heart of his child; he can enjoy it only as it passes, can
enjoy only its life, its soul, its vision, its meaning, not itself. To
hoard rubies and sapphires is as useless and hopeless for the heart, as if
I were to attempt to hoard this marvel of sand and water and sunlight in
the same iron chest with the musty deeds of my wife's inheritance.

"Father," I murmured half aloud, "thou alone art, and I am because thou
art. Thy will shall be mine."