54 MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 



the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers 

 of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy 

 those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that 

 all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave warriors 

 who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved 

 for us the priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept 

 undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the home of the un 

 subdued. 



But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a 

 quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present 

 always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, 

 in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocable- 

 ness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an over 

 powering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the 

 inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some 

 strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the 

 world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, 

 we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling 

 and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial 

 things that, to a superficial view, make up the common 

 life of day by day ; we see, surrounding the narrow raft 

 illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, 

 the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief 

 hour ; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks 

 in upon our refuge ; all the loneliness of humanity amid 

 hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, 

 which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can 

 command, against the whole weight of a universe that 

 cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this 

 struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism 

 into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation 

 into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From 

 that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, 

 enunciation, wisdom, and charity are born ; and with 



