ride? no! Humility, loneliness, something of a just and
deserved fear; but most of all, desire, insatiable, unwavering, an
intense desire. This passion of the race, its never satisfied hunger,
its incredible intensity and persistency of striving and longing,
is at once the tragedy and glory, the witness to the helplessness,
the revelation of the capacity of the race. The mainspring of human
activity, the creative impulse from which in devious ways all the
thousand-hued motives of our lives arise, is revealed in the ancient
cry, "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!" That unquenched
thirst for Him underlies all human life, as the solemn stillness of
the ocean underlies the restless upper waves. The dynamic of the world
is the sense of the divine reality. The woe of the world is man's
inability to discover and appropriate that reality. Who that has
entered truly into life does not perceive beneath all the glitter of
its brilliance, the roar of its energy and achievement, the note of
melancholy? The great undertone of life is solemn in its pathetic
uniformity. The poets and prophets of the world have seized unerringly
upon that melancholy undertone. Who ever better understood the
futility and helplessness of unaided man, the certain doom that tracks
down his pride of insolence, or his sin, than the Greek tragedians?
Sophocles, divided spirit that he was, heard that note of melancholy
long ago by the AEgean, wrote it into his somber dramas, with their
turbid ebb and flow of human misery. Sometimes the voices of our
humanity as they rise blend and compose into one great cry that is
lifted, shivering and tingling, to the stars, "Oh, that I knew where I
might find Him!" Sometimes and more often they sink into a subdued and
minor plaint, infinitely touching in its human solicitude, perplexity
and pain. Again, James Stephens has phrased it for us in his verse
_The Nodding Stars_.[29]

[Footnote 29: _Songs from the Clay_, p. 68.]

"Brothers, what is it ye mean,
What is it ye try to say
That so earnestly ye lean
From the spirit to the clay.

"There are weary gulfs between
Here and sunny Paradise,
Brothers! What is it ye mean
That ye search with burning eyes,

"Down for me whose fire is clogged,
Clamped in sullen, earthy mould,
Battened down and fogged and bogged,
Where the clay is seven-fold."

Now we understand the tragic aspect of nature and of the human soul
caught in this cosmic dua