re of an infinite sea, or to the other who smiles all his life,
without cause, alone in his little room? "Happiness, sorrow"--could we
only escape from ourselves for one instant and taste of the hero's
sadness, would there be many content to return to their own superficial
delights?

Do happiness and sorrow, then, only exist in ourselves, and that even
when they seem to come from without? All that surrounds us will turn to
angel or devil, according as our heart may be. Joan of Arc held
communion with saints, Macbeth with witches, and yet were the voices
the same. The destiny whereat we murmur may be other, perhaps, than we
think. She has only the weapons we give her; she is neither just nor
unjust, nor does it lie in her province to deliver sentence on man. She
whom we take to be goddess, is a disguised messenger only, come very
simply to warn us on certain days of our life that the hour has sounded
at last when we needs must judge ourselves.

46. Men of inferior degree, it is true, are not given to judging
themselves, and therefore is it that fate passes judgment upon them.
They are the slaves of a destiny of almost unvarying sternness, for it
is only when man has been judged by himself that destiny can be
transformed. Men such as these will not master, or alter within them,
the event that they meet; nay, they themselves become morally
transformed by the very first thing that draws near them. If misfortune
befall them, they grovel before it and stoop down to its level; and
misfortune, with them, would seem always to wear its poorest and
commonest aspect. They see the finger of fate in every least thing that
may happen--be it choice of profession, a friendship that greets them,
a woman who passes, and smiles. To them chance and destiny always are
one; but chance will be seldom propitious if accepted as destiny.
Hostile forces at once take possession of all that is vacant within us,
nor filled by the strength of our soul; and whatever is void in the
heart or the mind becomes a fountain of fatal influence. The Margaret
of Goethe and Ophelia of Shakespeare had perforce to yield meekly to
fate, for they were so feeble that each gesture they witnessed seemed
fate's own gesture to them. But yet, had they only possessed some
fragment of Antigone's strength--the Antigone of Sophocles--would they
not then have transformed the destinies of Hamlet and Faust as well as
their own? And if Othello had taken Corneille's Pauline to wif