s night at least was
theirs: there is no love like that which lives victorious even beneath
the shadow of death: there is no joy like that which finds its paradise
even amid the cruelty of pain, the fierce long struggle of despair.

Never is the voluptuous glory of the sun so deep, so rich, as when its
last excess of light burns above the purple edge of the tempest-cloud
that soars upward to cover and devour it.

* * *

"And we reign still!"

She turned, as she spoke, towards the western waters, where the sea-line
of the AEgean lay, while in her eyes came the look of a royal pride and
of a deathless love.

"Greece cannot die. No matter what the land be now, Greece--_our_
Greece--must live for ever. Her language lives; the children of Europe
learn it, even if they halt it in imperfect numbers. The greater the
scholar, the humbler he still bends to learn the words of wisdom from
her school. The poet comes to her for all his fairest myths, his noblest
mysteries, his greatest masters. The sculptor looks at the broken
fragments of her statues, and throws aside his calliope in despair
before those matchless wrecks. From her soldiers learn how to die, and
nations how to conquer and to keep their liberties. No deed of heroism
is done but, to crown it, it is named parallel to hers. They write of
love, and who forgets the Lesbian? They dream of freedom, and to reach
it they remember Salamis. They talk of progress, and while they talk
they sigh for all that they have lost in Academus. They seek truth, and
while they seek, wearily long, as little children, to hear the golden
speech of Socrates, that slave, and fisherman, and sailor, and
stonemason, and date-seller were all once free to hear in her Agora. But
for the light that shone from Greece in the breaking of the Renaissance,
Europe would have perished in its Gothic darkness. They call her dead:
she can never die while her life, her soul, her genius breathe fire into
the new nations, and give their youth all of greatness and of grace that
they can claim. Greece dead! She reigns in every poem written, in every
art pursued, in every beauty treasured, in every liberty won, in every
god-like life and godlike death, in your fresh lands, which, but for
her, would be barbarian now."

Where she stood, with her eyes turned westward to the far-off snows of
Cithaeron and Mount Ida, and the shores which the bronze spear of Pallas
Athene once guarded through the ni