dramas must be wherein the sage is
attacked--great sorrow surely, but also great radiance that springs
from this sorrow, and already is partly triumphant over the shadow of
grief? Needs must Antoninus have wept as all men must weep; but tears
can quench not one ray in the soul that shines with no borrowed light.
To the sage the road is long that leads from grief to despair; it is a
road untravelled by wisdom. When the soul has attained such loftiness
as the life of Antoninus shows us that his had acquired, then is each
falling tear illumined by beautiful thought and by generous feeling. He
would have taken calamity to him, to all that was purest, most vast, in
his soul; and misfortune, like water, espouses the form of the vase
that contains it. Antoninus, we say, would have brought resignation to
bear; but this is a word that too often conceals the true working of a
noble heart. There is no soul so petty but what it too may believe that
it is resigned. Alas! it is not resignation that comforts us, raises
and chastens; but indeed the thoughts and the feelings in whose name we
embrace resignation; and it is here that wisdom doles out the rewards
they have earned to her faithful.

Some ideas there are that lie beyond the reach of any catastrophe. He
will be far less exposed to disaster who cherishes ideas within him
that soar high above the indifference, selfishness, vanities of
everyday life. And therefore, come happiness or sorrow, the happiest
man will be he within whom the greatest idea shall burn the most
ardently. Had fate so desired it, Antoninus also, perhaps, had been
guilty of incest and parricide; but his inward life would not have been
crushed thereby, as was that of Oedipus; nay, these very catastrophes
would have given him mightier strength, and destiny would have fled in
despair, strewing the ground by the emperor's palace with her nets and
her blunted weapons; for even as triumph of dictators and consuls could
be celebrated only in Rome, so can the true triumph of Fate take place
nowhere save in our soul.

17. Where do we find the fatality in "Hamlet," "King Lear," in
"Macbeth"? Is its throne not erected in the very centre of the old
king's madness, on the lowest degree of the young prince's imagination,
at the very summit of the Thane's morbid cravings? Macbeth we may well
pass by; not need we linger over Cordelia's father, for his absence of
consciousness is all too manifest; but Hamlet, Hamlet the think