, blind the eyes of all who would pass.
Those who by chance go forth to you, come back to me again, and but one
in ten thousand passes on. My illusions are sweeter to them than truth.
I offer every soul its own shadow. I pay them their own price. I have
grown rich, though the simple shepards of old gave me birth. Men have
made me; the mortals have made me immortal. I rose up like a vapor from
their first dreams, and every sigh since then and every laugh remains
with me. I am made up of hopes and fears. The subtle princes lay out
their plans of conquest in my cave, and there the hero dreams, and there
the lovers of all time write in flame their history. I am wise, holding
all experience, to tempt, to blind, to terrify. None shall pass by. Why,
therefore, dost thou wait?"

The Wise One looked at her, and she shrank back a little, and a little
her silver and violet faded, but out of her cave her voice still
sounded:

"The stars and the starry crown are not yours alone to offer, and
every promise you make I make also. I offer the good and the bad
indifferently. The lover, the poet, the mystic, and all who would drink
of the first fountain, I delude with my mirage. I was the Beatrice who
led Dante upwards: the gloom was in me, and the glory was mine also,
and he went not out of my cave. The stars and the shining of heaven were
illusions of the infinite I wove about him. I captured his soul with the
shadow of space; a nutshell would have contained the film. I smote on
the dim heart-chords the manifold music of being. God is sweeter in the
human than the human in God. Therefore he rested in me."

She paused a little, and then went on: "There is that fantastic fellow
who slipped by me. Could your wisdom not retain him? He returned to me
full of anguish, and I wound my arms round him like a fair melancholy;
and now his sadness is as sweet to him as hope was before his fall.
Listen to his song!" She paused again. A voice came up from the depths
chanting a sad knowledge:

What of all the will to do?
It has vanished long ago,
For a dream-shaft pierced it through
From the Unknown Archer's bow.

What of all the soul to think?
Some one offered it a cup
Filled with a diviner drink,
And the flame has burned it up.

What of all the hope to climb?
Only in the self we grope
To the misty end of time,
Truth has put an end to hope.

Wha