The weird sisters were forms of awe and magnitude proportionate to the woes they dealt out, to the destiny they wove. But the very littleness of the daily chances that actually shape fate is, in its discordance and its mockery, more truly terrible and most hideously solemn—it is the little child's laugh at a frisking kitten which brings down the avalanche, and lays waste the mountain side, or it is the cackle of the startled geese that saves the Capitol.
To be the prey of Atropos was something at the least; and the grim Deus vult perdere, uttered in the delirium of pain, at the least made the maddened soul feel of some slender account in the sight of the gods and in the will of Heaven. But we, who are the children of mere accident and the sport of idlest opportunity, have no such consolation.
Of course they will stone you, as village bumpkins run out and stone an odd stray bird that they have never seen before; and the more beautiful the plumage looks, the harder rain the stones. If the bird were a sparrow the bumpkins would let it be.
Love that remembers aught save the one beloved may be affection, but it is not love.
Ariel could not combat a leopardess; Ithuriel's spear glances pointless from a rhinoceros' hide. To match what is low and beat it, you must stoop, and soil your hands to cut a cudgel rough and ready. She did not see this; and seeing it, would not have lowered herself to do it.
Which is the truth, which is the madness?—when the artist, in the sunlit ice of a cold dreamland, scorns love and adores but one art; or when the artist, amidst the bruised roses of a garden of passion, finds all heaven in one human heart?