"
"But are you not--I beg your pardon for interposing on your eloquence with
dull objection," said Percivale--"are you not begging all the question?
_Is_ life such an affair of sunshine and gladness?"
"If life is not, then I confess all this show of nature is worse than
vanity--it is a vile mockery. Life is gladness; it is the death in it that
makes the misery. We call life-in-death life, and hence the mistake. If
gladness were not at the root, whence its opposite sorrow, against which
we arise, from which we recoil, with which we fight? We recognise it as
death--the contrary of life. There could be no sorrow but for a recognition
of primordial bliss. This in us that fights must be life. It is of the
nature of light, not of darkness; darkness is nothing until the light
comes. This very childplay, as you call it, of Nature, is her assertion of
the secret that life is the deepest, that life shall conquer death. Those
who believe this must bear the good news to them that sit in darkness and
the shadow of death.
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