What! Barter my birthright of immortality for the mess of pottage of a few brief years of union?
Pay out my high hopes to their last bright coin for this dinner of mingled herbs?
Drain the well of faith dug with so many prayers and labours, that its waters may suffice to nourish a rose planted in the sand, whose blooms must die at the first touch of creeping earthly frost?
"The philosopher would say that I was mad; that the linnet in the hand is better than all the birds of paradise which ever flew in fabled tropic seas.
"I reply that I am content to wait till upon some glorious morning my ship breaks into the silence of those seas, and, watching from her battered bulwarks, I behold the islands of the Blest and catch the scent of heavenly flowers, and see the jewelled birds, whereof I dream floating from palm to palm.
"'But if there are no such isles ?' he would answer; 'If, with their magic birds and flowers, they are indeed but the baseless fabric of a dream?
If your ship, amidst the ravings of the storm and the darkness of the tortured night, should founder once and for ever in the dark strait which leads to the gateways of that Dawn--those gateways through which no traveller returns to lay his fellows' course for the harbours of your perfect sea; what then ?' "Then I would say, let me forswear God Who has suffered me to be deceived with false spirits, and sink to depths where no light breaks, where no memories stir, where no hopes torment.

Yes, then let me deny Him and die, who am of all women the most miserable.

But it is not so, for to me a messenger has _come_; at my prayer once the Gates were opened, and now I know quite surely that it was permitted to me to see within them that I might find strength in this the bitter hour of my trial.
"Yet how can I choke the truth and tread down the human heart within me?
Oh! the road which my naked feet must tread is full of thorns, and heavy the cross that I must bear.

I go now, in a few minutes' time, to bid him farewell.

If I can help it I shall never see him again.