Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/79

 I also remembered your true remark, that you had never pronounced the words pain and the past before a woman, without hearing an almost inaudible sigh at the union of the two words, from the suffering heart; for woman on the narrower stage of her plans, with idealized wishes and desires built on others' worth, rather than on her own, has a thousand times more disappointments to suffer than we men.

The sun sank deeper behind the mountains, and giant shadows, like mighty birds of prey, came coldly down upon us from the eternal snow. I took Karlson's hand in mine, and looked with tearful eyes into his manly, beautiful countenance, and said, "O Karlson! on what a blooming, grand world you throw an immeasurable gravestone, which no time can lift! Are two difficulties, based too on the necessary ignorance of man, sufficient to overthrow a belief, which explains thousand greater difficulties, without which our existence is without aim, our sufferings without explanation, and the holy Trinity in our breast three furies, and three terrible contradictions? A tending God's hand, leading and feeding the inner man (the child of the outer one), teaching him to go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in all things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant human face, from the chaotic nations of the primitive ages to the present century, from the first faint pulsation of the invisible heart to its full, bold, throbbing pulse in manhood,—and why? That when man stands upright and exalted, a beautiful demi-god, even amid the ruins of his old body temple, the club of Death may annihilate the demi-god forever? And on the eternal sea, on which