nd it against me; for either it or I shall
perish. If he does not--as he does not--let him give up living in a lie,
and taking on his lips blasphemies against the immortals, from which his
heart and reason revolt!'

And she clapped her hands again for the maid-servant, gave her the
letter silently, shut the doors of her chamber, and tried to resume her
Commentary on Plotinus. Alas! what were all the wire-drawn dreams of
metaphysics to her in that real and human struggle of the heart? What
availed it to define the process by which individual souls emanated
from the universal one, while her own soul had, singly and on its own
responsibility, to decide so terrible an act of will? or to write fine
words with pen and ink about the immutability of the supreme Reason,
while her own reason was left there to struggle for its life amid a
roaring shoreless waste of doubts and darkness? Oh, how grand,
and clear, and logical it had all looked half an hour ago! And how
irrefragably she had been deducing from it all, syllogism after
syllogism, the non-existence of evil!--how it was but a lower form of
good, one of the countless products of the one great all-pervading mind
which could not err or change, only so strange and recondite in its form
as to excite antipathy in all minds but that of the philosopher, who
learnt to see the stem which connected the apparently bitter fruit
with the perfect root from whence it sprang. Could she see the stem
there?--the connection between the pure and supreme Reason, and the
hideous caresses of the debauched and cowardly Orestes? was not that
evil pure, unadulterate with any vein of good, past, present,
or future?...

True;--she might keep her spirit pure amid it all; she might sacrifice
the base body, and ennoble the soul by the self-sacrifice .... And yet,
would not that increase the horror, the agony, the evil of it-to her,
at least, most real evil, not to be explained away-and yet the gods
required it? Were they just, merciful in that? Was it like them, to
torture her, their last unshaken votary? Did they require it? Was it
not required of them by some higher power, of whom they were only the
emanations, the tools, the puppets?--and required of that higher power
by some still higher one--some nameless, absolute destiny of which
Orestes and she, and all heaven and earth, were but the victims, dragged
along in an inevitable vortex, helpless, hopeless, toward that for which
each was meant?--And s