and eternal man, is worth all theories and
all philosophies. Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books;
we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any _Critique
of Pure Reason_.

But Don Quixote was converted. Yes--and died, poor soul. But the other,
the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives amongst us,
animating us with his spirit--this Don Quixote was not converted, this
Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this
Don Quixote must never die. And the conversion of the other Don
Quixote--he who was converted only to die--was possible because he was
mad, and it was his madness, and not his death nor his conversion that
immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for the crime of having been
born.[67] _Felix culpa!_ And neither was his madness cured, but only
transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he
stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.

This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered
lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he had freed the galley
slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that
Dante saw there and replaced it by one on which was written "Long live
hope!" and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at
him, he went to heaven. And God laughed paternally at him, and this
divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.

And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with
desperation. And does he not fight out of despair? How is it that among
the words that English has borrowed from our language, such as _siesta,
camarilla, guerrilla_, there is to be found this word _desperdo_? Is not
this inward Don Quixote that I spoke of, conscious of his own tragic
comicness, a man of despair (_desesperado_). A _desperado_--yes, like
Pizarro and like Loyola. But "despair is the master of impossibilities,"
as we learn from Salazar y Torres (_Elegir al enemigo_, Act I.), and it
is despair and despair alone that begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad
hope. _Spero quia absurdum_, it ought to have been said, rather than
_credo_.

And Don Quixote, who lived in solitude, sought more solitude still; he
sought the solitudes of the Pena Pobre, in order that there, alone,
without witnesses, he might give himself up to greater follies with
which to assuage his soul. But he was not quite alone, for Sancho
accompanied him--Sancho the good, Sancho the believ