[Some weeks after being rejected by a young woman he loved, Donal Grant finished college and is travelling away from home looking for work.]
He had not gone far when he found himself on a wide moor. He sat down on a big stone, and began to turn things over in his mind. This is how his thoughts went:
"I can never be the man I was! The thought of my heart is taken frome me! I cannot think about things as I used to. There's nothing so beautiful as before. When the life slips from him, how can a man go on living? Yet I'm not dead--that's what makes the difficulty of the situation! If I were dead--well, I do not know what then! I think there would be trouble still, though some things might be easier. But that's neither here nor there; I must live; I have no choice; I didn't make myself, and I'm not going to meddle with myself.
"But there's one question I must settle before I go further--and that's this: am I to be less or more than I was before? It's agreed I cannot be the same: if I cannot be the same, I must either be less or greater than I was before: which of them is it to be? I wouldn't have that question asked more than once! I'll be more than I was. To sink to less would be to lose grip of my past as well as of my future! And how would I ever look her in the face if I grew less because of her! A child like me let a pretty girl think herself to blame for what I grew to be! And there's a greater than the girl to be considered! Because he does not see fit to give me her I would have, is he not to have his will of me? It's a grand thing to know a girl like that one, and a grander thing yet to be allowed to love her: to sit down and cry because I'm not to marry her would be most ungrateful! Why should I complain that I ought to have her? Why shouldn't I be disappointed as well as another? I have as good a right to any good that's to come of that, I fancy! If it be a man's part to carry a sore heart, it cannot be his part to sit down with it upon the road-side, and lay it upon his lap, and cry over it, like a child with a cut finger: he must hold on his road. Who am I to differ from the rest of my folk? I shall be like the rest, and if I cry I will not complain. The Lord himself had to be crowned with pain. Oh, my pretty girl! But you love a better man, and that's a great comfort! If it had been otherwise, I do not think I could have born the pain at my heart. But as it's good and not ill that's come to you, I have not you and myself to cry for, and that's a great comfort! Lord, I'll climb to thee, and gather of the healing that grows for the nations in thy garden.
"I see the thing as plain as anything can be: the cure of all ill is just more life! That's it! Life above and beyond the life that took the stroke! And if through this heart-break I come by more life, it will be just one of the throes of my heavenly birth--in which the child has as many of the pains as the mother: that's maybe a difference between the two--the earthly and the heavenly!
"So now I have to begin afresh, and let the thing that's past and gone slip after other dreams. Oh, but it's a beautiful dream yet! It lies close behind me, not to be forgotten, not to be looked at--like one of those dreams of water and moonlight that has no work in them: a person shouldn't lie all night and all day too in a dream of the soul's gloaming! No, Lord; make of me a strong man, and then give me as much of the good as may please thee. Who am I to listen to, if not to thee, my own father and mother and grandfather and everybody in one, for thou givest me them all!
"Now I'm to begin again--a fresh life from this minute! I'm to set out from this very point, like one of the youngest sons in the fairy tales, to seek my portion, and see what's coming to meet me as I go to meet it. The world before me's my story-book. I cannot see over the page until I come to the end of it. When I was a child, just able, with great effort, to win at the heart of print, I never would look on ahead! The one time I did it, I thought I had done a shameful thing, like looking in at a keyhole--as I did just once too, when I thank God my mother gave me such a blessed licking that I knew it must be something dreadful I had done. So here's for what's coming! I know where it must come from, and I shall make it welcome. My mother says the main mischief in the world is, that folk will not let the Lord have his own way, and so he just has to take it, which makes it a painful thing for them."
Therewith he rose to encounter that which was on its way to meet him. He is a fool who stands and lets life move past him like a panorama. He is also a fool who would lay hands on its motion, and change its pictures. He can but distort and injure, if he does not ruin them, and come upon awful shadows behind them.
And lo! as he glanced around him, already something of the old mysterious loveliness, now for so long vanished from the face of the visible world, had returned to it--not yet as it was before, but with dawning promise of a new creation, a fresh beauty, in welcoming which he was not turning from the old, but receiving the new that God sent him. He might yet be many a time sad, but to lament would be to act as if he were wronged--would be at best weak and foolish! He would look the new life in the face, and be what it should please God to make him. The scents the wind brought him from the field and garden and moor, seemed sweeter than ever wind-borne scents before: they were seeking to comfort him! He sighed--but turned from the sigh to God, and found fresh gladness and welcome. The wind hovered about him as if it would fain have something to do in the matter; the river rippled and shone as if it knew something worth knowing as yet unrevealed. The delight of creation is verily in secrets, but in secrets as truths on the way. All secrets are embryo revelations. On the far horizon heaven and earth met as old friends, who, though never parted, were ever renewing their friendship. The world, like the angels, was rejoicing--if not over a sinner that had repented, yet over a man that had passed from a lower to a higher condition of life--out of its earth into its air: he was going to live above, and look down on the inferior world! Ere the shades of evening fell that day around Donal Grant, he was in the new childhood of a new world.