blind to the many delicate connections which preserve system and harmony; and in our fancied wisdom imagine that we are mastering her secrets, bringing order out of what to us seems chaos. She smiles serenely at our blindness, waiting for its consequences to teach us our needs. When our wisdom has become ignorance and our ignorance true wisdom, she compensates us for our toil and suffering, becoming the companion and friend of the soul-pilgrim, as she has been the Sphinx and scourge of the intellectual despot.

Minna and Wilfred both desire Seraphita; but before they can possess her they must desire and possess each other. Two in one is the divine likeness. The inability of the rational nature, with its attendant expectations, to realize the perception and power which come from the union of the two, is strongly revealed in Wilfred's conversation with Seraphita. She speaks for him an unknown tongue, even as she does at first for Minna. Her "awful faculty of comprehension" forms the answers which do not accord with their limited perceptions. This rouses sorrow in Minna and anger in Wilfred, again a striking illustration of their natures. So, when the divine, penetrating through the intervening strata, seeks to instruct us, we at first reject and turn from the heavenly intent, only to seek it later with tears and beseeching,

"It wounds me," says Wilfred, to Seraphita, "to hear you apply the dreadful knowledge which