above the earth, and who
carries his soul in chaos, discerns afar shapes like his own, he sees
_the other_--the terrifying outline which spies and roams and turns
again, with the snare of his head. Man pursues man to kill him and
woman to wound her. He bites that he may eat, he strikes down that he
may clasp,--furtively, in gloomy hollows and hiding-places or in the
depths of night's bedchamber, dark love is writhing,--he lives solely
that he may protect, in some disputed cave, his eyes, his breast, his
belly, and the caressing brands of his hearth.

* * * * * *

There is a great calm in my environs.

From place to place, men have gathered together. There are companies
and droves of men, with watchmen, in the vapors of dawn; and in the
middle one makes out the children and the women, crowding together like
fallow deer. To eastward I see, in the silence of a great fresco, the
diverging beams of morning gleaming, through the intervening and somber
statues of two hunters, whose long hair is tangled like briars, and who
hold each other's hand, upright on the mountain.

Men have gone towards each other because of that ray of light which
each of them contains; and light resembles light. It reveals that the
isolated man, too free in the open expanses, is doomed to adversity as
if he were a captive, in spite of appearances; and that men must come
together that they may be stronger, that they may be more peaceful, and
even that they may be able to live.

For men are made to live their life in its depth, and also in all its
length. Stronger than the elements and keener than all terrors are the
hunger to last long, the passion to possess one's days to the very end
and to make the best of them. It is not only a right; it is a virtue.

Contact dissolves fear and dwindles danger. The wild beast attacks the
solitary man, but shrinks from the unison of men together. Around the
home-fire, that lowly fawning deity, it means the multiplication of the
warmth and even of the poor riches of its halo. Among the ambushes of
broad daylight, it means the better distribution of the different forms
of labor; among the ambushes of night, it stands for that of tender and
identical sleep. All lone, lost words blend in an anthem whose murmur
rises in the valley from the busy animation of morning and evening.

The law which regulates the common good is called the moral law.
Nowhere nor ever has moral