Note the words that follow: "when your fear cometh as desolation, and
your destruction as a whirlwind;" for her wrath is of irresistible
tempest: once roused, it is blind and deaf,--rabies--madness of anger--
darkness of the Dies Irae.

And that is, indeed, the sorrowfullest fact we have to know about our own
several lives. Wisdom never forgives. Whatever resistance we have
offered to her loaw, she avenges forever; the lost hour can never be
redeemed, and the accomplished wrong never atoned for. The best that can
be done afterwards, but for that, had been better; the falsest of all the
cries of peace, where there is no peace, is that of the pardon of sin, as
the mob expect it. Wisdom can "put away" sin, but she cannot pardon it;
and she is apt, in her haste, to put away the sinner as well, when the
black aegis is on her breast.

118. And this is also a fact we have to know about our national life,
that it is ended as soon as it has lost the power of noble Anger. When
it paints over, and apologizes for its pitiful criminalities; and endures
its false weights, and its adulterated food; dares not to decide
practically between good and evil, and can neither honor the one, nor
smite the other, but sneers at the good, as if it were hidden evil, and
consoles the evil with pious sympathy, and conserves it in the sugar of
its leaden heart,--the end is come.

119. The first sign, then, of Athena's presence with any people is that
they become warriors, and that the chief thought of every man of them is
to stand rightly in his rank, and not fail from his brother's side in
battle. Wealth, and pleasure, and even love, are all, under Athena's
orders, sacrificed to this duty of standing fast in the rank of war.

But further: Athena presides over industry, as well as battle; typically,
over women's industry; that brings comfort with pleasantness. Her word
to us all is: "Be well exercised, and rightly clothed. Clothed, and in
your right minds; not insane and in rags, nor in soiled fine clothes
clutched from each other's shoulders. Fight and weave. Then I myself
will answer for the course of the lance, and the colors of the loom."

And now I will ask the reader to look with some care through these
following passages respecting modern multitudes and their occupations,
written long ago, but left in fragmentary form, in which they must now
stay, and be of what use they can.

120. It is not political economy to put a number