Pallas.
It would interest me to know whether in our old home you were conscious of this incongruity, of this lack of harmony between your science and your occasions of using it.
Æsculapius.
No; I think not. I was satisfied in the possession of exact knowledge, and not directly
aware of the charm of application. It is the result, no doubt, of this resignation of immortality which has startled and alarmed us all so much——
Pallas.
Me, Æsculapius, it has neither alarmed nor startled.
Æsculapius.
I mean that while we were beyond the dread of any attack, the pleasure of rebutting such attack was unknown to us. I have divined, since our misfortunes, that disease itself may bring an excitement with it not all unallied to pleasure.... You smile, Euterpe, but I mean even for the sufferer. There is more in disease than the mere pang and languishment. There is the sense of alleviation, the cessation of the throb, the resuming glitter in the eye, the restoration of cheerfulness and appetite. These,
Pallas, are qualities which are indissolubly identified with pain and decay, and which therefore—if we rightly consider—were wholly excluded from our experience. In Olympus we never brightened, for we never flagged; we never waited for a pang to subside, nor felt it throbbing less and less poignantly, nor, as if we were watching an enemy from a distance, hugged ourselves in a breathless ecstasy as it faded altogether; this exquisite experience was unknown to us, for we never endured the pang.