lry: they were brutal to their
beasts, and could be as brutal to their foes: they were steeped in
legend and tradition from their cradles; and all the darkest
superstitions of dead ages still found home and treasury in their hearts
and at their hearths.

They had always been a religious people in this birth country of the
Flamma race: the strong poetic reverence of their forefathers, which had
symbolised itself in the carving of every lintel, corbel or buttress in
their streets, and the fashion of every spire on which a weather-vane
could gleam against the sun, was still in their blood; the poetry had
departed, but the bigotry remained.

* * *

"The earth and the air are good," she thought, as she lay there watching
the dark leaves sway in the foam and the wind, and the bright-bosomed
birds float from blossom to blossom. For there was latent in her, all
untaught, that old pantheistic instinct of the divine age, when the
world was young, to behold a sentient consciousness in every leaf
unfolded to the light; to see a soul in every created thing the day
shines on; to feel the presence of an eternal life in every breeze that
moves, in every grass that grows; in every flame that lifts itself to
heaven; in every bell that vibrates on the air; in every moth that soars
to reach the stars.

Pantheism is the religion of the poet; and nature had made her a poet,
though man as yet had but made of her an outcast, a slave, and a beast
of burden.

"The earth and the air are good," she thought, watching the sun-rays
pierce the purple hearts of a passion-flower, the shadows move across
the deep brown water, the radiant butterfly alight upon a lily, the
scarlet-throated birds dart in and out through the yellow feathery
blossoms of the limes.

* * *

When a man clings to life for life's sake, because it is fair and sweet,
and good in the sight and the senses, there may be weakness in his
shudder at its threatening loss. But when a man is loth to lose life
although it be hard, and joyless, and barren of all delights, because
this life gives him power to accomplish things greater than he, which
yet without him must perish, there is the strength in him, as there is
the agony of Prometheus.

With him it must die also: that deep dim greatness within him, which
moves him, despite himself; that nameless unspeakable force which
compels him to create and to achieve; that vision by which he beholds