AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. 199 



see a very different race than that which meets our 

 common sight. To this larger vision, within which 

 the past supplements the present, the great army of 

 men and women moves to a solemn and appealing 

 music. The pathos of life touches them with an 

 indescribable dignity ; the work of life gives them 

 an unspeakable nobility. Under the meanest ex 

 terior there are one knows not what tragedies of 

 denied hopes and unappeased longings ; behind the 

 mask of evil there shines one knows not what 

 struggling virtue overborne by impulses that flow 

 from the past like irresistible torrents. Hidden 

 under all manner of disguises weakness, poverty, 

 ignorance, vulgarity there waits a world of ideals 

 never realized but never lost ; the fire of aspiration 

 burns in a thousand thousand souls that are maimed 

 and broken, bruised and baffled, but which still sur 

 vive. Is not this the unquenchable spark that some 

 day, in freer air, shall break into white flame ? It 

 is the Imagination only that discerns in a thousand 

 contradictions, a thousand obscurities, the large de 

 sign to be revealed when the ring of the hammer 

 has ceased, the dust of toil been laid, the scaffold 

 ing removed, and the finished structure suddenly 

 discloses the miracle wrought among those who 

 were blind. 



