tory of three young men who went
seeking for help in battle into the house of the gods at Slieve-na-mon.
"You must first be married," some god told them, "because a man's good or
evil luck comes to him through a woman."

I sometimes fence for half-an-hour at the day's end, and when I close my
eyes upon the pillow I see a foil playing before me, the button to my
face. We meet always in the deep of the mind, whatever our work, wherever
our reverie carries us, that other Will.

IX

The poet finds and makes his mask in disappointment, the hero in defeat.
The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder
used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained. The saint
alone is not deceived, neither thrusting with his shoulder nor holding out
unsatisfied hands. He would climb without wandering to the antithetical
self of the world, the Indian narrowing his thought in meditation or
driving it away in contemplation, the Christian copying Christ, the
antithetical self of the classic world. For a hero loves the world till it
breaks him, and the poet till it has broken faith; but while the world was
yet debonair, the saint has turned away, and because he renounced
Experience itself, he will wear his mask as he finds it. The poet or the
hero, no matter upon what bark they found their mask, so teeming their
fancy, somewhat change its lineaments, but the saint, whose life is but a
round of customary duty, needs nothing the whole world does not need, and
day by day he scourges in his body the Roman and Christian conquerors:
Alexander and Caesar are famished in his cell. His nativity is neither in
disappointment nor in defeat, but in a temptation like that of Christ in
the Wilderness, a contemplation in a single instant perpetually renewed of
the Kingdom of the World; all, because all renounced, continually present
showing their empty thrones. Edwin Ellis, remembering that Christ also
measured the sacrifice, imagined himself in a fine poem as meeting at
Golgotha the phantom of "Christ the Less," the Christ who might have lived
a prosperous life without the knowledge of sin, and who now wanders
"companionless a weary spectre day and night."

"I saw him go and cried to him
'Eli, thou hast forsaken me.'
The nails were burning through each limb,
He fled to find felicity."

And yet is the saint spared, despite his martyr's crown and his vigil of
desire, defeat, disappointed love, and the sorro