They
come to torment us all at times. I say to torment, for, alas! thinking
can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought. What is the
purpose of our feeble crying in the awful silences of space? Can our dim
intelligence read the secrets of that star-strewn sky? Does any answer
come out of it? Never any at all, nothing but echoes and fantastic
visions! And yet we believe that there is an answer, and that upon a
time a new Dawn will come blushing down the ways of our enduring night.
We believe it, for its reflected beauty even now shines up continually
in our hearts from beneath the horizon of the grave, and we call it
Hope. Without Hope we should suffer moral death, and by the help of Hope
we yet may climb to Heaven, or at the worst, if she also prove but a
kindly mockery given to hold us from despair, be gently lowered into the
abysses of eternal sleep.
Then I fell to reflecting upon the undertaking on which we were bent,
and what a wild one it was, and yet how strangely the story seemed to
fit in with what had been written centuries ago upon the sherd.
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