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“and the world hath the day, and must break thee,

not thou the world.”

Gordon won his resignation, and knew, or almost knew, the truth. The “criticism of life” that we find in the first two scenes of “The Road to Avernus” is almost ripe: pessimistic, it is true, but almost ripe. Laurence has lost his love, (and Laurence, let us remember, is the lover that “kisses too hard!”) Does he despair in the strain of “Rolla,” or “bluster,” and take refuge in the breast of “the wondrous mother age,” and the “vision of the world” in the strain of the man of “Locksley Hall?” No, he has lost his love, and the loss is bitter, but

“such has been, and such shall still be, here as there, in sun or star.

These things are to be and will be; those things were to be and are.”

“As it was so,” he says again,

“as it was so in the beginning,

it shall be so in the end.”

There is the feeling here of a man who is striving to see things as they are. He will not blind himself to things: he will not answer “the painful riddle of the earth” by “stopping up his mouth with a clod.” He will have true faith, or no faith. Fate rules us, he sees: