is just then most likely to fall like Herod from his aerial pomp to the very dust.  This consciousness, revealing at the highest moment of joy its utmost frailty, led the ancients to suspect the presence of some Ate or Nemesis in all human triumphs.  We all remember the king who threw his signet-ring into the sea, that he might in his too happy fortunes avert this suspected presence; we remember, too, the apprehension of the Chorus in the “Seven against Thebes,” looking forward from the noontide prosperity of the Theban king to some coming catastrophe.

But it is not without us that this Nemesis waits; she is but another name for the fearful possibility which lurks in every human will, of treachery to itself.  And as solemnity rises to its acme in the most sensuous manifestation of the glory of life,—­so in all that most fascinates and bewilders, at the very crisis of victorious exaltation, at the very height of joyous sensibility, does this mysterious power of temptation reveal her subtlest treachery; and sometimes in a single moment does she change the golden-filleted Horae, that are our ministers, into frightful furies, which drive us back again from triumph into flight.

What was it, then, which saved the Eleusinia from this defeat,—­which kept the movement of the Dionysiac procession from the ruin inevitably consequent upon all intemperate joy?  It was the presence of our Lady, the sorrowing Achtheia, who was the inseparable companion of the joyous conqueror,—­who subdued the joy of victory, and preserved the strength and holy purity of the great Festival.  Demeter was thus necessary to Dionysus,—­as Dionysus to Demeter; and if in remembrance of him the sepulchral walls were covered with scenes associated with festivity,—­in remembrance of her there must needs be a skeleton at every feast.

How inseparably connected in human thought is sorrow with all permanent hope is indicated in the penances which men have imposed upon themselves, from the earliest Gymnosophists of India, and the Stylitae of Syria, down to the monastic orders of the Romish Church in later times.  This is the meaning of the old Indian fable which made two of the Rishis or penitents to have risen by the discipline of sorrow from some low caste,—­it may be, from very Pariahs,—­first to the rank of Brahmins, and at last to the stars.  The first initiation in which we veil our eyes, losing all, is essential to our fresher birth, by which in the second initiation all things are unveiled to us as our inheritance:  indeed, it is only through that which veils that anything is ever revealed or possessed.

Through the same gate we pass both to glory and to tragic suffering, each of which heightens and measures the other; and it is only so that we can understand the function of sorrow in the Providence of God, or interpret the sudden calamities which sometimes overwhelm human hopes at their highest aspiration,—­which from the most serene and cloudless sky evoke storms which leave not even a wreck from their vast ruin.