ire brooding and
discomfited, and finally to take his own life. Schryhart and Hand,
venomous men both, unable to discover whether they had really
triumphed, were to die eventually, puzzled. A mayor whose greatest
hour was in thwarting one who contemned him, lived to say: "It is a
great mystery. He was a strange man." A great city struggled for a
score of years to untangle that which was all but beyond the power of
solution--a true Gordian knot.

And this giant himself, rushing on to new struggles and new
difficulties in an older land, forever suffering the goad of a restless
heart--for him was no ultimate peace, no real understanding, but only
hunger and thirst and wonder. Wealth, wealth, wealth! A new grasp of a
new great problem and its eventual solution. Anew the old urgent
thirst for life, and only its partial quenchment. In Dresden a palace
for one woman, in Rome a second for another. In London a third for his
beloved Berenice, the lure of beauty ever in his eye. The lives of two
women wrecked, a score of victims despoiled; Berenice herself weary,
yet brilliant, turning to others for recompense for her lost youth.
And he resigned, and yet not--loving, understanding, doubting, caught
at last by the drug of a personality which he could not gainsay.

What shall we say of life in the last analysis--"Peace, be still"? Or
shall we battle sternly for that equation which we know will be
maintained whether we battle or no, in order that the strong become not
too strong or the weak not too weak? Or perchance shall we say (sick of
dullness): "Enough of this. I will have strong meat or die!" And die?
Or live?

Each according to his temperament--that something which he has not made
and cannot always subdue, and which may not always be subdued by others
for him. Who plans the steps that lead lives on to splendid glories,
or twist them into gnarled sacrifices, or make of them dark,
disdainful, contentious tragedies? The soul within? And whence comes
it? Of God?

What thought engendered the spirit of Circe, or gave to a Helen the
lust of tragedy? What lit the walls of Troy? Or prepared the woes of an
Andromache? By what demon counsel was the fate of Hamlet prepared? And
why did the weird sisters plan ruin to the murderous Scot?

Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

In a mulch of darkness are bedded the roots of endless sorrows--and of
endless joys. Canst thou fix thine eye on the mo