but a hill, but I have stood on greater giants
than he, and seen the clouds rise below me, like Jupiter on Olympus."

"But you need climb no mountains to feel yourself a god," cried
Antinous; "the godlike is your title--you command and the world must
obey. With a mountain beneath his feet a man is nearer to heaven no
doubt than he is on the plain."

"Well?"

"I dare not say what came into my mind."

"Speak out."

"I knew a little girl who when I took her on my shoulder would stretch
out her arms and exclaim, 'I am so tall!' She fancied that she was
taller than I then, and yet was only little Panthea."

"But in her own conception of herself, it was she who was tall, and that
decides the issue, for to each of us a thing is only that which it seems
to us. It is true they call me godlike, but I feel every day, and a
hundred times a day, the limitations of the power and nature of man, and
I cannot get beyond them. On the top of a mountain I cease to feel them;
there I feel as if I were great, for nothing is higher than my head, far
or near. And when, as I stand there, the night vanishes before my eyes,
when the splendor of the young sun brings the world into new life for
me, by restoring to my consciousness all that just before had been
engulfed in gloom, then a deeper breath swells my breast, and my lungs
fill with the purer and lighter air of the heights. Up there, alone and
in silence, no hint can reach me of the turmoil below, and I feel myself
one with the great aspect of nature spread before me. The surges of the
sea come and go, the tree-tops in the forest bow and rise, fog and
mist roll away and part asunder hither and thither, and up there I feel
myself so merged with the creation that surrounds me that often it
even seems as though it were my own breath that gives it life. Like the
storks and the swallows, I yearn for the distant land, and where should
the human eye be more likely to be permitted, at least in fancy, to
discern the remote goal than from the summit of a mountain?

"The limitless distance which the spirit craves for seems there to
assume a form tangible to the senses, and the eye detects its border
line. My whole being feels not merely elevated, but expanded, and that
vague longing which comes over me as soon as I mix once more in the
turmoil of life, and when the cares of state demand my strength,
vanishes. But you cannot understand it, boy. These are things which no
other mortal can share w