with angels. It never apologizes; it
never rationalizes; and it never explains. That is why the great
ineffable passages in the supreme masters take us by the throat and
strike us dumb. Deep calls unto deep in them, and our heart listens
and is silent. To do good scientific thinking in the cause of humanity
has its well-earned reward; but the gods throw incense on a different
temper. The "fine issues" that reach them, in their remoteness and
their disdain, are the "fine issues" of an antagonist worthy of their
own swift wrath, their own swift vengeance, and their own swift
love.

The ultimate drama of the world, a drama never-ending, lies
between the children of Zeus and the children of Prometheus;
between the hosts of Jehovah and the Sons of the Morning. God and
Lucifer still divide the stage, and in Homer, Shakespeare, Dante,
Milton, and Goethe the great style is never more the great style than
when it brings these eternal Antagonists face to face, and compels
them to cross swords. What matter if, in reality, they have their
kingdoms in the heart of man rather than the Empyrean or Tartarus?
The heart of man, in its unchangeable character, must ever remain
the true Coliseum of the world, where the only interesting, the only
dramatic, the only beautiful, the only classical things are born and
turned into music.

Beauty! That is what we all, even the grossest of us, in our heart of
hearts are seeking. Lust seeks it; Love creates it; the miracle of Faith
finds it--but nothing less, neither truth nor wisdom nor morality nor
knowledge, neither progress nor reaction, can quench the thirst we
feel.

Yes, it is Beauty we crave, and yet, how often, in the strain and
stress of life, it seems as though this strange impossible Presence,
rising thus, like that figure in the Picture, "beside the waters" of the
fate that carries us, were too remote, too high and translunar, to
afford us the aid we need. Heine tells us somewhere, how, driven by
the roar of street-fighting, into the calm cool galleries of the Louvre,
sick and exhausted in mind and body, he fell down at the feet of the
Goddess of Beauty there, standing, as she still stands, at the end of
that corridor of mute witnesses, and as he looked to her for help, he
knew that she could never bend down to him, or lift him up out of
his weariness, for they had broken her long ago, and _she had no
arms!_

Alas! It is true enough that there are moments, when, under the
pressur