the majestic words of Epictetus more helpful to a
manlier bearing than the confessions of the saintliest souls. If, as is
not to be doubted, there are others who seek an issue from the same dark
region where I wandered, I do not fear to point them to the Stoic way,
which like a narrow gorge cold with perpetual shadow is yet their
shortest path upward to the high slopes lit with sunlight. Let them
enter it without fear and endure its shadows a while, for by other ways
they will fetch a longer compass and come later to their release.

But when some interval had passed I became aware that this cold ideal
was not the end, and that out of the gall of austerity sweetness should
yet come forth. Wise men have said that all great systems of ethics
meet upon a higher plane, as the branches of forest trees rustle
together in the breeze; for though in the dark earth their roots creep
apart, their summits are joined in the freedom of clear air. As I now
struck inland from the iron shores of shipwreck, my heart warmed to a
brighter and softer landscape, and with Landor I began to wish that I
might walk with Epicurus on the right hand and Epictetus on the left.
With a later thinker I reflected that if the Stoic knew more of the
faith and hope of Christianity, the Epicurean came nearer to its
charity. For it is true that Stoicism commands admiration rather than
love. It was indeed too harsh a saying that "the ruggedness of the Stoic
is only a silly affectation of being a god, to wind himself up by
pulleys to an insensibility of suffering": that is the judgment of the
bluff partisan, so shocked by the adversary's opinions that he feels
absolved from any effort to understand them. But even those who in
extremity have been roused to new valour by the precepts as by a Tyrtaean
ode, for all the gratitude which they owe, will not impute to their
deliverers an inhuman perfection. The Stoic does in truth wear a
semblance of academic conceit, as though related to God not as a child
to its father, but as a junior to a senior colleague. And with all its
sufficiency, his philosophy seems too Fabian in its counsels; it is
always withdrawing, passing by on the other side, avoiding battle--so
that as a preparation for the uttermost ordeal it will often prove
inferior to the reckless pugnacity of a narrow zealot.

Then, too, it acts like a frost not merely upon personal, but upon
national ambition, and so keeps the wellspring from the root. Its
assum