April 10, 1841.
VII.
PLUTO AND TARTARUS.
April 15, 1841.
Margaret said very little about Pluto. On the first evening she had called him the depth of things, and James Clarke now had a good deal to say upon the three ideas which she thought pervaded the Greek mythology,—the source, the depth, and the extent or flow of thought. He said that this distinction had struck him very forcibly when Margaret first mentioned it. We speak of widely diffused thought, of aspiring and profound thought; of sympathetic, exalted, or deep feeling,—and this seemed to exhaust language. It was through the depths of feeling and experience that we came to the profound of thought.
E. P. P. said, “There is no genius in happiness.” Not a very intelligible statement.
Margaret said, “There is nothing worth knowing that has not some penalty attached to it. We pay it the more willingly in proportion as we grow wise. Depth, altitude, diffusion, are the three births of Time. It is this which makes the German cover the operations of the miner with a mystic veil. Bostonians laugh at the Germans because they think.”
Wheeler liked what Mr. Clarke said, and added that there was meaning in the Irish phrase, “Lower me up.”
Margaret said that all the punishments of Tartarus expressed baffled effort, the penalty least endurable to the active Greek.