xvi. APPLES OF SODOM. 2 99 



ful things in nature are set to the same key-note of 

 sorrow, suffering, and death ; and their beauty is devel- 

 oped through the suffering and death, through the im- 

 perfection and decay. To the ruin or abrasion of its 

 shores the Mediterranean Sea owes the lovely blue of its 

 waters; and the bright azure of the summer skies is 

 caused in large measure by the diffusion through them 

 of the dust of life. 



And this is the way of God in the human world. 

 Evil is the minister of beauty. How often of our 

 failures and disappointments, of the worm in the bud of 

 our hopes, are made galls that seem almost as fair and 

 satisfying, at least to the eye, as the fruits of success 

 themselves would have been. The beauty is shown in 

 these arrested and perverted growths, which if allowed 

 to develop and ripen in a natural way, would have 

 bloomed in the flower and satisfied in the fruit. The 

 most beautiful poems, which appear the appropriate 

 fruit of a happy and prosperous life, are thus often mere 

 galls, caused by the poison or blight of some secret 

 sorrow or frustrated hope ; and the life that bears these 

 apples of Sodom has learned in suffering what it taught 

 in song. The tears of humanity have been turned into 

 pearls, its wounds into fruits, its sighs into music. Men 

 and women, like the trees of the forest, grow more 

 beautiful with age and decadence ; and in the autumnal 

 face is seen truer and higher loveliness than ever shone 

 in its spring fairness and freshness. Human ruins, like 

 architectural, are much more suggestive than perfect 

 lives, " richer and more various in the ideas and 



