was on a journey--all things about me fell into a
more perfect harmony than is their wont. Everything seemed to be, for
a moment, after all, almost for the best. Through the train of my
thoughts, one against another, it was as if I became aware of the
dominant power of another person in controversy, wrestling with me. I
seem to be come round to the point at which I left off then. The
antagonist has closed with me again. A protest comes, out of the very
depths of man's radically hopeless condition in the world, with the
energy of one of those suffering yet prevailing [185] deities, of which
old poetry tells. Dared one hope that there is a heart, even as ours,
in that divine 'Assistant' of one's thoughts--a heart even as mine,
behind this vain show of things!"

NOTES

172. Virgil, Aeneid Book 1, line 462. "There are the tears of
things..." See also page 175 of this chapter, where the same text is
quoted in full.

173. +Transliteration: enodioi symboloi. Pater's Definition: "omens by
the wayside."

175. +Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Virgil, Aeneid
Book 1, line 462. Translation: "Here also there be tears for what men
bear, and mortal creatures feel each other's sorrow," from Vergil,
Aeneid, Theodore C. Williams. trans. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Co. 1910.

CHAPTER XXVI: THE MARTYRS

"Ah! voila les ames qu'il falloit a la mienne!"
Rousseau.

[186] THE charm of its poetry, a poetry of the affections, wonderfully
fresh in the midst of a threadbare world, would have led Marius, if
nothing else had done so, again and again, to Cecilia's house. He
found a range of intellectual pleasures, altogether new to him, in the
sympathy of that pure and elevated soul. Elevation of soul,
generosity, humanity--little by little it came to seem to him as if
these existed nowhere else. The sentiment of maternity, above all, as
it might be understood there,--its claims, with the claims of all
natural feeling everywhere, down to the sheep bleating on the hills,
nay! even to the mother-wolf, in her hungry cave--seemed to have been
vindicated, to have been enforced anew, by the sanction of some divine
pattern thereof. He saw its legitimate place in the world given at
last to the bare capacity for [187] suffering in any creature, however
feeble or apparently useless. In this chivalry, seeming to leave the
world's heroism a mere property of the stage, in this