THREE:With Christianity, there came a certain inversion of parts. The external universe again became subjected to narrow limitations, and the flammantia moenia mundi beyond which Epicurus had dared to penetrate, were raised up once more and guarded by new terrors as an impassable barrier to thought. But infinity took refuge within the soul; and, while in this life a sterner self-control than even that of Stoicism was enjoined, perspectives of illimitable delight in another life were disclosed. Finally, at the Renaissance, every barrier was simultaneously overthrown, and the accumulated energies of western civilisation expatiated over a field which, if it was vast in reality, was absolutely unbounded in imagination. Great as were the achievements of that age, its dreams were greater still; and what most excites our wonder in the works of its heroes is but the fragment of an unfinished whole. The ideal of life set up by Aristotle was, like his conception of the world, contradicted in every particular; and the relative positions assigned by him to act and power were precisely reversed. It has been shown how Shakespeare reflected the Platonism of his contemporaries: he reflected also the fierce outburst of their ambition; and in describing what they would dare, to possess solely sovereign sway and masterdom, or wear without corrival all the dignities of honour, he borrowed almost the very words used by Euripides to express the feelings encouraged by some teachers of his time. The same spirit is exhibited a generation later in the dramas of Calderon and Corneille, before their thoughts were forced into a different channel by the stress of the Catholic reaction; while its last and highest manifestation is the sentiment of Miltons ruined archangel, that to reign in hell is better than to serve in heaven. Thus,400 when Hobbes reduces all the passions to modes of the fundamental desire for power,557 he does but give the scientific theory of that which stands proclaimed in more thrilling accents by the noblest poetry of his age.Two steers, locking their horns, broke from the herd and swaying an instant so, separated and started side by side across the prairie. He settled in his saddle and put his cow-pony to a run, without any preliminary gait, going in a wide circle to head them back. Running across the ground, thick with coyote and dog holes, was decidedly perilous; men had their necks[Pg 164] broken in that way every few days; but it would not have mattered to him especially to have ended so. Wherefore he did not, but drove the steers back to the herd safely. And then he returned to the monotonous sentry work and continued thinking of himself.
THREE:86She stood by the mound for a little while thinking of him, of how well he had lived and died, true to his standard of duty, absolutely true, but lacking after all that spirit of love without which our actions profit so little and die with our death. She had a clearer realization of it than ever before. It came to her that Charles Cairness's life, wandering, aimless, disjointed as it was, and her own, though it fell far below even her own not impossibly high ideals, were to more purpose, had in them more of the vital force of creation, were less wasted, than his had been. To have known no enthusiasmswhich are but love, in one form or anotheris to have failed to give that impulse to the course of events which every man born into the world should hold himself bound to give, as the human debt to the Eternal.
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