e suffer, also, and if possible, would help. So,
too, the spectacle of the erring world must sadden the philosopher
even in the Acropolis of his wisdom; he would, if it might be,
descend from his meditation and teach. But those movements of
sympathy are quickly inhibited by despair of success; impossibility
of action is a great condition of the sublime. If we could count the
stars, we should not weep before them. While we think we can
change the drama of history, and of our own lives, we are not awed
by our destiny. But when the evil is irreparable, when our life is
lived, a strong spirit has the sublime resource of standing at bay
and of surveying almost from the other world the vicissitudes of
this.

The more intimate to himself the tragedy he is able to look back
upon with calmness, the more sublime that calmness is, and the
more divine the ecstasy in which he achieves it. For the more of
the accidental vesture of life we are able to strip ourselves of, the
more naked and simple is the surviving spirit; the more complete
its superiority and unity, and, consequently, the more unqualified
its joy. There remains little in us, then, but that intellectual essence,
which several great philosophers have called eternal and identified
with the Divinity.

A single illustration may help to fix these principles in the mind.
When Othello has discovered his fatal error, and is resolved to take
his own life, he stops his groaning, and addresses the ambassadors
of Venice thus:

Speak of me as I am: nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice: then, must you speak
Of one that loved, not wisely, but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this:
And say, besides, that in Aleppo once
When a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus.

There is a kind of criticism that would see in all these allusions,
figures of speech, and wandering reflections, an unnatural
rendering of suicide. The man, we might be told, should have
muttered a few broken phrases, and killed himself without this
pomp of declamatio