ignet-ring into the sea, that he might in his too happy fortunes avert
this suspected presence; we remember, too, the apprehension of the
Chorus in the "Seven against Thebes," looking forward from the noontide
prosperity of the Theban king to some coming catastrophe.

But it is not without us that this Nemesis waits; she is but another
name for the fearful possibility which lurks in every human will, of
treachery to itself. And as solemnity rises to its acme in the most
sensuous manifestation of the glory of life,--so in all that most
fascinates and bewilders, at the very crisis of victorious exaltation,
at the very height of joyous sensibility, does this mysterious power
of temptation reveal her subtlest treachery; and sometimes in a single
moment does she change the golden-filleted Horae, that are our ministers,
into frightful furies, which drive us back again from triumph into
flight.

What was it, then, which saved the Eleusinia from this defeat,--which
kept the movement of the Dionysiac procession from the ruin inevitably
consequent upon all intemperate joy? It was the presence of our Lady,
the sorrowing Achtheia, who was the inseparable companion of the joyous
conqueror,--who subdued the joy of victory, and preserved the strength
and holy purity of the great Festival. Demeter was thus necessary to
Dionysus,--as Dionysus to Demeter; and if in remembrance of him the
sepulchral walls were covered with scenes associated with festivity,--in
remembrance of her there must needs be a skeleton at every feast.

How inseparably connected in human thought is sorrow with all permanent
hope is indicated in the penances which men have imposed upon
themselves, from the earliest Gymnosophists of India, and the Stylitae of
Syria, down to the monastic orders of the Romish Church in later times.
This is the meaning of the old Indian fable which made two of the
_Rishis_ or penitents to have risen by the discipline of sorrow from
some low caste,--it may be, from very Pariahs,--first to the rank of
Brahmins, and at last to the stars. The first initiation in which we
veil our eyes, losing all, is essential to our fresher birth, by
which in the second initiation all things are unveiled to us as our
inheritance: indeed, it is only through that which veils that anything
is ever revealed or possessed.

Through the same gate we pass both to glory and to tragic suffering,
each of which heightens and measures the other; and it is only so tha