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242 life sometimes merciful at the eleventh hour, giving the one, the individual soul, as a consolation, as a reward for that love for the many?

Now he felt quite lonely, he who was a dreamer as well as a thinker and a man of action. And an irresistible wish to be no longer lonely made him come down suddenly from that ring of glittering peaks. There was nothing waiting for him in Holland, nothing to draw him towards those low lands of his birth, into the swarm of utterly indifferent people, full of petty insignificance, save alone, perhaps, that it was there—in the same house where the vision had been conjured up—there that the soul was waiting, there that the one individual soul would bide his coming.

"It is only a fancy," he now thought. " A fancy . . . at my age! No, if any such thing had to happen, it would have happened in the years of youth in which we have the right to feel, to dream, to seek . . . to seek for the one. Now that so many years, silent, dead years, lie heaped up around her and around me . . . and between us, now it becomes absurd to feel, to dream, to seek those sweet solaces which we feel, dream and seek only when we are very young, but not when we have lost even our right to the remembrance of our youth, the reflection of our childish memories. . . ."

Still he came down from the mountains. . ..