BIRDS OF PREY. 155 



All! our globe is a barbarous world, though still in its youth; a 

 world of attempts and rude beginnings, given over to cruel slaveries 

 to night, hunger, death, fear! Death? We can accept it; there 

 is in the soul enough of hope and faith to look upon it as a passage, 

 a stage of initiation, a gate to better worlds. But, alas, was pain so 

 useful as to render it necessary to prodigalize it? I feel it, I 

 see it, I hear it everywhere. Not to hear it, to preserve the 

 thread of ray thoughts, I am forced to stop up my ears. All the 

 activity of my soul would be suspended, my nerves shattered by it ; 

 I should eifect nothing more, I should no longer move forward; my 

 life and powers of production would remain barren, annihilated by 

 pity! 



" And yet is not pain the warning which teaches us to foresee and 

 to anticipate, and by every means in our power to ward off our dissolu- 

 tion ? This cruel school is the stimulant and spur of prudence for all 

 living things a powerful drawing back of the soul upon itself, which 

 otherwise would be enfeebled by happiness, by soft and weakening 

 impressions. 



" May it not be said that happiness has a centrifugal attraction 

 which diffuses us wholly without, detains us, dissipates us, would 

 evaporate and restore us to the elements, if we wholly abandoned 

 ourselves to it ? Pain, on the contrary, if experienced at one point, 

 brings back all to the centre, knits closer, prolongs, ensures and 

 fortifies existence. 



"Pain is in some wise the artist of the world which creates us, 

 fashions us, sculptures us with the fine edge of a pitiless chisel. It 

 limits the overflowing life. And that which remains, stronger and 

 more exquisite, enriched by its very loss, draws thence the gift of a 

 higher being." 



These thoughts of resignation were awakened by one who was 

 herself a sufferer, and whose clear eye discerned, even before I myself 

 did, my troubles and my doubts. 



As the individual, said she again, so is the world. Earth itself has 

 been benefited by Pain. Nature begot her through the violent 



