'
'Destiny, no doubt, in the Greek drama concerns itself only with the
great,' says he, in that wonderful book of his. 'But who are the
great? With the unseen powers, mysterious and imperious, who govern
while they seem not to govern all that is seen, who are the great? In
a world where man's loftiest ambitions are to higher intelligences
childish dreams, where his highest knowledge is ignorance, where his
strongest strength is to heaven a derision--who are the great? Are
they not the few men and women and children on the earth who greatly
love?'
II
So sweet a sound as that childish voice I had never heard before.
I held my breath and listened.
Into my very being that child-voice passed, and it was a new music
and a new joy. I can give the reader no notion of it, because there
is not in nature anything with which I can compare it. The blackcap
has a climacteric note, just before his song collapses and dies, so
full of pathos and tenderness that often, when I had been sitting on
a gate in Wilderness Road, it had affected me more deeply than any
human words.
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