'Forbear, Piso,' quickly rejoined the Queen; 'it is to no purpose. You have my thanks, but your Emperor has closed the door of peace forever. It is now war unto death. He may prove victor: it is quite possible: but I draw not back--no word of supplication goes from me. And every citizen of Palmyra, save a few sottish souls, is with me. It were worth my throne and my life, the bare suggestion of an embassy now to Aurelian. But let us not speak of this, but of things more agreeable. The day for trouble, the night for rest. Fausta, where is the quarter of Calpurnius? methinks it is hereabouts.'
'It is,' replied Fausta, 'just beyond the towers of the gate next to us; were it not for this thick night, we could see where at this time he is usually to be found, doing, like yourself, an unnecessary task.'
'He is a good soldier and a faithful--may he prove as true to you, my noble girl, as he has to me. Albeit I am myself a sceptic in love, I cannot but be made happier when I see hearts worthy of each other united by that bond. I trust that bright days are coming, when I may do you the honor I would. Piso, I am largely a debtor to your brother--and Palmyra as much. Singular fortune! that while Rome thus oppresses me, to Romans I should owe so much; to one twice my life, to another my army. But where, Lucius Piso, was your heart, that it fell not into the snare that caught Calpurnius?'
'My heart,' I replied, 'has always been Fausta's, from childhood--'
'Our attachment,' said Fausta, interrupting me, 'is not less than love, but greater. It is the sacred tie of nature, if I may say so, of brother to sister; it is friendship.'
'You say well,' replied the Queen. 'I like the sentiment. It is not less than love, but greater. Love is a delirium, a dream, a disease. It is full of disturbance. It is unequal, capricious, unjust; its felicity, when at the highest, is then nearest to deepest misery; a step, and it is into unfathomable gulfs of woe. While the object loved is as yet unattained, life is darker than darkest night. When it is attained, it is then oftener like the ocean heaving and tossing from its foundations, than the calm, peaceful lake, which mirrors friendship. And when lost, all is lost, the universe is nothing. Who will deny it the name of madness? Will love find entrance into Elysium? Will heaven know more than friendship? I trust not. It were an element of discord there, where harmony should reign perpetual.' After a pause, in which she seemed buried in thought, she added musingly--'What darkness rests upon the future! Life, like love, is itself but a dream; often a brief or a prolonged madness. Its light burns sometimes brightly, oftener obscurely, and with a flickering ray, and then goes out in smoke and darkness. How strange that creatures so exquisitely wrought as we are, capable of such thoughts and acts, rising by science, and art, and letters, almost to the level of gods, should be fixed here for so short a time, running our race with the unintelligent brute; living not so long as some, dying like all. Could I have ever looked out of this life into the possession of any other beyond it, I believe my aims would have been different. I should not so easily have been satisfied with glory and power: at least I think so; for who knows himself? I should then, I think, have reached after higher kinds of excellence, such for example as, existing more in the mind itself, could be of avail after death--could be carried out of the world--which power, riches, glory, cannot. The greatest service which any philosopher could perform for the human race, would be to demonstrate the certainty of a future existence, in the same satisfactory manner that Euclid demonstrates the truths of geometry. We cannot help believing Euclid if we would, and the truths he has established concerning lines and angles, influence us whether we will or not. Whenever the immortality of the soul shall be proved in like manner, so that men cannot help believing it, so that they shall draw it in with the first elements of all knowledge, then will mankind become a quite different race of beings. Men will be more virtuous and more happy. How is it possible to be either in a very exalted degree, dwelling as we do in this deep obscure, uncertain whether we are mere earth and water, or parts of the divinity; whether we are worms or immortals; men or gods; spending all our days in, at best, miserable perplexity and doubt? Do you remember, Fausta and Piso, the discourse of Longinus in the garden, concerning the probability of a future life?
'We do, very distinctly.'
'And how did it impress you?'
'It seemed to possess much likelihood,' replied Fausta, 'but that was all.'
'Yes,' responded the Queen, sighing deeply, 'that was indeed all. Philosophy, in this part of it, is a mere guess. Even Longinus can but conjecture. And what to his great and piercing intellect stands but in the strength of probability, to ours will, of necessity, address itself in the very weakness of fiction. As it is, I value life only for the brightest and best it can give now, and these to my mind are power and a throne. When these are lost I would fall unregarded into darkness and death.'