air. "I am a pagan, you see: I do not fancy that you care much for
creeds yourself."

"Creeds? I wish there were no such word. It has only been a rallying-cry
for war, an excuse for the bigot to burn his neighbour."

"No. Long ago, under the Andes, Nezahualcoytl held the same faith that
Socrates had vainly taught in the Agora; and Zengis Khan knew the truth
of theism like Plato; yet the world has never generally learnt it. It is
the religion of nature--of reason. But the faith is too simple and too
sublime for the multitude. The mass of minds needs a religion of
mythics, legend, symbolism, and fear. What is impalpable escapes it; and
it must give an outward and visible shape to its belief, as it gives in
its art a human form to its deity. Come, since we agree in our creed, I
will take you to my temple--a temple not made by hands."

* * *

"I never had a fair field!"--it may be sometimes a coward's apology; but
it is many a time the epitome of a great, cramped, tortured, wasted
life, which strove like a caged eagle to get free, and never could beat
down the bars of the den that circumstances and prejudice had forged.
The world sees the few who do reach freedom, and, watching their bold
upright flight, says rashly, "will can work all things." But they who
perish by the thousand, the fettered eagles who never see the sun; who
pant in darkness, and wear their breasts bare beating on the iron that
will never yield; who know their strength, yet cannot break their
prison; who feel their wings, yet never can soar up to meet the sweet
wild western winds of liberty; who lie at last beaten, and hopeless, and
blind, with only strength enough to long for death to come and quench
all sense and thought in its annihilation,--who thinks of them--who
counts them?

* * *

The earliest dawn had broken eastward, where the mountains
stretched--the dawn of a southern summer, that almost touches the sunset
of the past night--but under the dense shadows of the old woods that had
sheltered the mystic rites of Gnostics and echoed with the Latin hymns
to Pan, no light wandered. There was only a dim silvery haze that seemed
to float over the whiteness of the tall-stemmed arum lilies and the
foam-bells of the water that here and there glimmered under the rank
vegetation, where it had broken from its hidden channels up to air and
space. Not a sound disturbed the intense stillness; that the night waned
and