"Ye have increased wisdom unto sorrow, and sorrow unto infinite despair;—for there is now no Elysium—the vault of heaven has sunk back into immensity, and dissolved itself into nothingness; the boundaries of earth are set, and the earth itself resolved into a grain of dust, whirling in the vast white ring of innumerable suns and countless revolving worlds. Yet we were happier, believing the blossoming of stars to be only drops of milk from the perfect breast of a goddess.
"Nymphs haunted our springs; dryads slumbered in the waving shadows of our trees; zephyrs ethereal rode upon our summer winds; and great Pan played upon his pipe in the emerald gloom of our summer woods. Ye men of to-day have analyzed all substances, decomposed all elements, to discover the Undiscoverable, and ye have found it not. But in searching for the unsearchable, ye have lost joy.
"We loved the beauty of youth—the litheness of young limbs—the rosy dawn of maturity—the bloom of downy cheeks—the sweetness of eyes sweetened by vague desires of life's spring—the marvelous thrill of a first kiss—the hunger of love which had only to announce itself to be appeased—and the glory of strength. But ye have sought the secret of the Universal life in charnel-houses—dismembering rottenness itself and prying open the jaws of Death to view the awful emptiness therein. Learning only enough to appall you, ye have found that science can teach you less of beauty than our forgotten gymnasiums; but in the mean time, ye have forgotten how to love.
"We gave to the bodies of our well-beloved the holy purification of fire; ye confide them to the flesh-eating earth, filling your cities with skeletons. For us Death was bodiless and terrible; for you she is visible and yet welcome;—for so weary have men become of life that her blackness seems to them beauty,—the beauty of a mistress, the universal Pasiphila, who alone can give consolation to hearts weary of life. So that ye have even forgotten how to die!
"And thou, O dreamer, thou knowest that there was no beginning and that there shall be no end; but thou dost also know that the dust beneath thy feet has lived and loved, that all which now lives once lived not, and that what is now lifeless will live again;—thou knowest that the substance of the sweetest lips has passed through myriad million transformations, that the light of the sweetest eyes will still pass through innumerable changes after the fires of the stars have burnt themselves out. In seeking the All-Soul, thou hast found it in thyself, and hast elevated thyself to deity, yet for thee are vows vain and oracles dumb. Hope is extinguished in everlasting night; thou mayst not claim even the consolation of prayer, for thou canst not pray to thyself. Like the Mephistopheles of thy poet, O dreamer of the Nineteenth Century, thou mayst sit between the Sphinx of the Past and the Sphinx of the Future, and question them, and open their lips of granite, and answer their mocking riddles. But thou mayst not forget how to weep, even though thy heart grow old."...
But I could not weep!—And the phantoms, marveling, murmured with a strange murmur—"The heart of Medusa!"