Of late he had found his work bore him not a little--especially when riding away from Owlkirk.

The praise, notwithstanding, sounded sweet from her lips, was sweeter still from her eyes, and from the warmer white of her cheek, which had begun to resume its soft roundness.
"Ah!" thought the doctor, as he rode slowly home, "were it not for sickness, age, and death, this world of ours would be no bad place to live in.

Surely mine is the most needful and the noblest of callings!--to fight for youth, and health, and love; against age, and sickness, and decay! to fight death to the last, even knowing he must have the best of it in the end! to set law against law, and do what poor thing may be done to reconcile the inexorable with the desirable! Who knows--if law be blind, and I am a man that can see--for at the last, and only at the last do eyes come in the head of Nature--who knows but I may find out amongst the blind laws to which I am the eyes, that blind law which lies nearest the root of life!--Ah, what a dreamer I should have been, had I lived in the time when great dreams were possible! Beyond a doubt I should have sat brooding over the elixir of life, cooking and mixing, heating and cooling, watching for the flash in the goblet.

We know so much now, that the range of hope is sadly limited! A thousand dark ways of what seemed blissful possibility are now closed to us, because there the light now shines, and shows naught but despair.

Yet why should the thing be absurd?
Can any one tell _why_ this organism we call man should not go on working forever?
Why should it not, since its law is change and renewal, go on changing and renewing forever?
Why should it get tired?
Why should its law work more feeble, its relations hold less firmly, after a hundred years, than after ten?
Why should it grow and grow, then sink and sink?
No one knows a reason.
Then why should it be absurd to seek what shall encounter the unknown cause, and encountering reveal it?
Might science be brought to the pitch that such a woman should live to all the ages, how many common lives might not well be spared to such an end! How many noble ones would not willingly cease for such a consummation--dying that life should be lord, and death no longer king!" Plainly Faber's materialism sprang from no defect in the region of the imagination; but I find myself unable to determine how much honesty, and how much pride and the desire to be satisfied with himself, had relatively to do with it.