Contending with low wants and lofty will.
Till our mortality predominates,
And men are,—what they name not to themselves,
And trust not to each other.”
“Now that passage is every whit as fine as anything in Shakespeare,” thought Kremlin—“and the whole secret of human trouble is in it;—it is not the world that is wrong, but we—we ‘who make a conflict of its elements.’ The question is, if we are really ‘unfit to sink or soar’ is it our fault?—and may we not ask without irreverence why we were made so incomplete? Ah, my clever friend El-Râmi Zarânos has set himself a superhuman task on the subject of this ‘Why,’ and I fancy I shall find out the riddle of Mars, and many another planet besides, before he ‘proves,’ as he is trying to do, the conscious and individual existence of the soul.”
He turned over the pages of “Manfred” thoughtfully, and then stopped, his gaze riveted on the splendid lines in which the unhappy hero of the tragedy flings his last defiance to the accusing demons—
“The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts—
Is its own origin of ill and end—
And its own place and time—its innate sense,