But where does this Homeric mood lead us?  To no height of truth, I think.  Katherine Tingley gave us a keynote for the literature of the future and the grandest things it should utter,—­for the life, the art, the poetry of a coming time that shall be Theosophical, that is, lit with the splendor and beauty of the Soul—­when she spoke that high seeming paradox that “Life is Joy.”  Let us uncover the real Life; all this sorrow is only the veil that hides it.  God knows we see enough of the veil; but the poet’s business is to tear it down, rend it asunder, and show the brightness which it hides.  If the personality were all, and a man’s whole history were bounded by his cradle and his grave; then you had done all, when you had presented personalities in all their complexity, and made your page teem with the likenesses of living men, and only shown the Beyond, the Governance, as something unknowable, adverse and aloof.  But the Greater Part of a man is eternal, and each of his lives and deaths but little incidents in a vast and glorious pilgrimage; and when it is understood that this is the revelation to be made, this grandeur the thing to be shadowed forth, criticism will have entered upon its true path and mission.

I find no such Soul-symbol in the Iliad:  the passion and spiritual concentration of whose author, I think, was only enough to let him see this outward world:  personalities, with their motive-springs of action within themselves:  his greatness, his sympathy, his compassion, revealed all that to him; but he lacked vision for the Meanings.  I found him then less than Shakespeare:  whose clear knowledge of human personalities—­ ability to draw living men—­was but incidental and an instrument; who but took the tragedy of life by the way, as he went to set forth the whole story of the soul; never losing sight of Karma, and that man is his own adverse destiny; finishing all with the triumph of the soul, the Magician, in The Tempest. And I count him less than that Blind Titan in Bardism, who, setting out to justify the ways of God to men, did verily justify the ways of fate to the Soul; and showed the old, old truth, so dear to the Celtic bards, that in the very depths of hell the Soul has not yet lost all her original brightness; but is mightily superior to hell, death, fate, sorrow and the whole pack of them;—­I count him less than the “Evening Dragon” of Samson Agonistes, whose last word to us is

     “Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail
     Or knock the breast; no weakness or contempt.”

And I found him less that One with the grand tragic visage, whose words so often quiver with unshed tears, who went forth upon his journey

       .... pei dolci pomi
     Promessi a me per lo verace Duca;
     Ma fino al centro pria convien ch’io tomi:—­

“to obtain those sweet apples (of Paradise) promised me by my true Leader; but first is”—­convien—­how shall you translate the pride and resignation of that word?—­“it behoves,” we must say, “it convenes”—­“first it is convenient that I should fall as far as to the center (of hell);”—­who must end the gloom and terror of that journey, that fall, with