ance they had but the one doxy between them
and she of the stews to make shift with in delights amorous for life ran
very high in those days and the custom of the country approved with it.
Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his
wife for his friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that
effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters
to the university of Oxtail nor breathed there ever that man to whom
mankind was more beholden. Bring a stranger within thy tower it will
go hard but thou wilt have the secondbest bed. _Orate, fratres, pro
memetipso_. And all the people shall say, Amen. Remember, Erin, thy
generations and thy days of old, how thou settedst little by me and by
my word and broughtedst in a stranger to my gates to commit fornication
in my sight and to wax fat and kick like Jeshurum. Therefore hast thou
sinned against my light and hast made me, thy lord, to be the slave of
servants. Return, return, Clan Milly: forget me not, O Milesian. Why
hast thou done this abomination before me that thou didst spurn me for
a merchant of jalaps and didst deny me to the Roman and to the Indian of
dark speech with whom thy daughters did lie luxuriously? Look forth now,
my people, upon the land of behest, even from Horeb and from Nebo and
from Pisgah and from the Horns of Hatten unto a land flowing with milk
and money. But thou hast suckled me with a bitter milk: my moon and my
sun thou hast quenched for ever. And thou hast left me alone for ever
in the dark ways of my bitterness: and with a kiss of ashes hast thou
kissed my mouth. This tenebrosity of the interior, he proceeded to say,
hath not been illumined by the wit of the septuagint nor so much as
mentioned for the Orient from on high Which brake hell's gates visited a
darkness that was foraneous. Assuefaction minorates atrocities (as Tully
saith of his darling Stoics) and Hamlet his father showeth the prince no
blister of combustion. The adiaphane in the noon of life is an Egypt's
plague which in the nights of prenativity and postmortemity is their
most proper _ubi_ and _quomodo_. And as the ends and ultimates of
all things accord in some mean and measure with their inceptions and
originals, that same multiplicit concordance which leads forth growth
from birth accomplishing by a retrogressive metamorphosis that minishing
and ablation towards the final which is agreeable unto nature so is it
with our subsolar bein