And yet, the greatest and the richest inheritance of
all is not his, for it has fallen to another, to the man of heart, and
it is the inheritance of the kingdom of love.
In all ages the reason of the world has been at the mercy of brute
force. The reign of law has never had more than a passing reality, and
never can have more than that so long as man is human. The individual
intellect and the aggregate intelligence of nations and races have alike
perished in the struggles of mankind, to revive again, indeed, but as
surely to be again put to the edge of the sword. Here and there great
thoughts and great masterpieces have survived the martyrdom of a
thinker, the extinction of a school, the death of a poet, the wreck of a
high civilisation. Socrates is murdered with the creed of immortality on
his very lips; hardly had he spoken the wonderful words recorded in the
_Phaedo_ when the fatal poison sent its deathly chill through his limbs;
the Greeks are gone, yet the Hermes of Olympia remains, mutilated and
maimed, indeed, but faultless still, and still supreme. The very name
of Homer is grown wellnigh as mythic as his blindness. There are those
to-day who, standing by the grave of William Shakespeare, say boldly
that he was not the creator of the works that bear his name. And still,
through the centuries, Achilles wanders lonely by the shore of the
sounding sea; Paris loves, and Helen is false; Ajax raves, and Odysseus
steers his sinking ship through the raging storm.
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