wreathed its thorns round the anguished heads of men;
even in the midst of their festivals, when seeming to drink deep of joy
from the brimming cup of life, the invisible hand of a Gorgon Fate was
forever felt tracing upon their walls the decrees of a dark,
inscrutable, inflexible, and terrible destiny!

Yet there are poets among us, who would willingly return to the days of
Paganism, and resuscitate the gods of Greece!

'Get to dust as common mortals,
By a common doom and track!
Let no Schiller from the portals
Of that Hades call you back,
Or instruct us all to weep:
Everlasting be your sleep!
Pan, Pan is dead!'

''Twas the hour when one in Zion
Hung for Love's sake on a cross--
When His brow was chill with dying,
And His soul was faint with loss;
When His priestly blood dropped downward;
And His kingly eyes looked homeward--
Then Pan was dead!'

The Prometheus of the rock, the Tantalus of the fable, man, plunged in
this world of woe with his lips thirsty for happiness, stretches out his
hand to pluck the bitter Dead-Sea fruits of this earth. With his
profound instincts of the Infinite, his craving for the Absolute, he
seizes madly upon every object which suggests their image to him; the
foul fiend, adapting his temptations to the nature of the tempted, still
whispers, as into the ear of the mother of mankind: 'Ye shall be as
gods;'--but the phenomenal flies before him, and he everywhere falls
upon the thorns closely hedging in the narrow circle of the actual.
Without Faith, the artist is among the most miserable of men, for
through the illimitable horizons of the Infinite, genius catches secrets
which it can never fully utter; symbolic signs, whose sense it cannot
articulate; while the voice of the invisible Love loads every breeze.
What profound and mournful aspirations for that _Unknown_ which the
mortal may not see, surge through the soul of the imaginative!

'E'en the flowing azure air
Thou hast charmed for his despair.'

While the artist strives to incorporate with the works which their
presence shall render immortal, suggestions of Infinity, of Unity, let
him hopefully turn to the Author of all Beauty for true inspiration and
peace.

As satisfaction and response to the longings of the spirit, the Gospel
has brought Life and Immortality to light. The assurance that 'God is
Love' responds to the in