"And yet," said Mordaunt, slowly, as his mind gradually rose from its
dream-like oppression to its wonted and healthful tone, "yet, in
truth, we want neither sign nor omen from other worlds to teach us all
that it is the end of existence to fulfil in this; and that seems to
me a far less exalted wisdom which enables us to solve the riddles,
than that which elevates us above the chances, of the future."

"But can we be placed above those chances;--can we become independent
of that fate to which the ancients taught that even their deities were
submitted?"

"Let us not so wrong the ancients," answered Mordaunt; "their poets
taught it, not their philosophers. Would not virtue be a dream, a
mockery indeed, if it were, like the herb of the field, a thing of
blight and change, of withering and renewal, a minion of the sunbeam
and the cloud? Shall calamity deject it? Shall prosperity pollute?
then let it not be the object of our aspiration, but the byword of our
contempt. No: let us rather believe, with the great of old, that when
it is based on wisdom, it is throned above change and chance! throned
above the things of a petty and sordid world! throned above the
Olympus of the heathen! throned above the Stars which fade, and the
Moon which waneth in her course! Shall we believe less of the
divinity of Virtue than an Athenian Sage? Shall we, to whose eyes
have been revealed without a cloud the blaze and the glory of Heaven,
make Virtue a slave to those chains of earth which the Pagan subjected
to her feet? But if by her we can trample on the ills of life, are we
not a hundredfold more by her the vanquishers of death? All creation
lies before us: shall we cling to a grain of dust? All immortality is
our heritage: shall we gasp and sicken for a moment's breath? What if