longer than itself as the sun sank downward. Then there came a break of rose and purple over everything, and the mountains lifted themselves, pink and violet shining amid the snows of them, a red Tyrian orange glowing in every broken rocky angle, and sombre purple heights that had lost the sun glooming behind all that splendor.
"I thought that I knew what color is," Mrs. Lindsay said, in the midst of her exclamations, "but I did not. It is a barbarous profusion. How it makes one take breath from counting pennies! You have heard the story of the Spanish gentleman who, having dined with a distinguished foreigner at whose table the champagne ran short before the dinner was over, had pails of champagne brought out to the horses of his guest when the visit was returned. That gentleman must have been born in the olive country, or the orange country, or in this scene of profuse color."
"Perhaps he was born in the rock and sand country of old Castile, and grew up with a thirst upon him," Aurora replied, smiling.
She could smile now almost as of old. Perhaps some lightness and gayety were lacking, but the sweetness and delight were there.
"This is delicious for a holiday," she said. "But for a life and for employment I want nothing more beautiful than my dear old castle home. I could not write here. It seems to me that poetry, that all art, is the expression of a feeling that something is lacking to us."
"Is it not also an expression of delight?" her friend asked, glad to have her speak of her art.
"But one could not be delighted with a perpetual fulness," Aurora replied. "We are delighted with the momentary possession of what we have wanted, or we are enraptured with the hope of possessing it."
"You remind me of a story told me by a clergyman," Mrs. Lindsay said. "He had been trying to excite in a somewhat frivolous woman an enthusiastic desire for the happiness of heaven, and only succeeded in depressing her by his labored accumulation of splendors and enjoyments. He asked her what was the matter. 'I am wondering how in the world we are going to amuse ourselves through all eternity,' she said, with a sigh. 'With everything desirable attained and accomplished, it seems to me that I should just sit down and cry, like Alexander.'"
"There is something in it," Aurora said seriously, lifting her luminous eyes to the mountains. "I have thought that Nirvana may be true,—the Nirvana that is not annihilation, any more than it is annihilation for the streams to flow into the sea, but only perfect union and perfect repose. But what countless ages must intervene before that state will be reached! What storms of delight as we rush through the universe, like swallows through the morning, and catch the first sparkle of liberty and knowledge! What raptures of contemplation! What fulness of every heavenly emotion! What periods of heavenly quiet! Every wing stretched to its utmost, every capacity for joy over-flowed, every power exercised to the point of perfection, every finite thing known and comprehended, we sink at last into the arms of God and are penetrated by the Divine. It shines through us, and informs us, and in that ineffable existence we learn the last supreme science,—what God is.
"But even that trance may have an end. It seems to me harmonious that it should. Perhaps God, and we, as a part of him, may rush out again into action and creation, he flinging us from him into separate life, withdrawing and half hiding from us again, till again we come round the great circle and find him once more. Who knows if this creation which we see and are is the first that ever was? Who knows that it may not be the reaction from a past Nirvana? The small in the universe is an image of the great, as we were made in the image of God, and the same principles which underlie the Infinite guide the infinitesimal. God rested on the seventh day, and bade us do the same.
