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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
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