When they remembered how they
had seen Death and Socrates, those two great ones, meet; and how
the meeting had been as simple, as unaffected, as any meeting
between themselves and Socrates, any morning in the past, in the
Athenian _agora?_ And when Death should come to them, what should
they say but this: 'There is nothing about you that can impress
me; formerly I conversed with one greater than you are, and I
saw you pay your respects to Socrates.'

Could he, could any man have proclaimed the Divinity in Man, its
real and eternal existence, in any drama, in any poem, in any
glorious splendor of rhetoric with what fervor soever of mystical
ecstasy endued--with such deadly effectiveness, such inevitable
success, as in this simple way he elected? There are men whose
actions seem to spring from a source super-ethical: it is cheap
to speak of them as good, great, beautiful or sublime: these are
but the appearances they assume as we look upwards at them. What
they are in themselves is: (1) Compassionate;--it is the law
of their being to draw men upwards towards the Spirit; (2)
Impersonal;--there is a non-being or vacuity in them where we
have our passions, likings, preferences, dislikes and desires.
They are, in the Chinese phrase, "the equals of Heaven and Earth";

"Earth, heaven, and time, death, life and they
Endure while they shall be to be."

So Socrates, having failed in his life-attempt to save Athens,
entered with some gusto on that great _coup de main_ of his
death: to make it a thing which first a small group of his
friends should see; then that Greece should see; then that
thirty coming centuries and more should see; presented it
royally to posterity, for what, as a manifestation of the Divine
in man, it might be worth.

And look! what is the result? Scarcely is the 'thing of muscles
and sinews' cold: scarcely has high Socrates forgone his queer
satyr-like embodiment: when a new luminary has risen into the
firmament,--one to shine through thirty centuries certainly,

"Brighter than Jupiter--a blazing star
Brighter than Hesper shining out to sea"

--one that is still to be splendid in the heavens wherever in
Europe, wherever in America, wherever in the whole vast realm of
the future men are to arise and make question and peer up into
the beautiful skies of the Soul. A Phoenix in time has arisen
from the ashes of Socrates: from the glory and solemnity of his
death a Voice is mysti