see what beauty and nobility look like from within.  To him, then, his death is in itself a matter of no personal moment.  But the habit of his lifetime has been to turn every moment into a blow struck for the Soul, for the Light, for the Cause of Sublime Perfection.  And here now is the chance to strike the most memorable blow of all.  With infinite calmness he arranges every detail, and proceeds to strike it.  He continues to play the high part of Socrates,—­that is all.  You might go to death like a poet, in love with Death’s solemn beauty, you might go to her like a martyr, forgetting the awe of her in forevision of the splendor that lies beyond.  But this man broadly and publicly goes to her like Socrates.  He will allow her no fascination, no mystery; not even, nor by any means, equality with the Soul of Man. . . .  And Apollodorus might weep then, and burst into an angry cry; and Crito and Phaedo and the rest might all break down—­then; but what were they to think afterwards?  When they remembered how they had seen Death and Socrates, those two great ones, meet; and how the meeting had been as simple, as unaffected, as any meeting between themselves and Socrates, any morning in the past, in the Athenian agora? And when Death should come to them, what should they say but this:  ’There is nothing about you that can impress me; formerly I conversed with one greater than you are, and I saw you pay your respects to Socrates.’

Could he, could any man have proclaimed the Divinity in Man, its real and eternal existence, in any drama, in any poem, in any glorious splendor of rhetoric with what fervor soever of mystical ecstasy endued—­with such deadly effectiveness, such inevitable success, as in this simple way he elected?  There are men whose actions seem to spring from a source super-ethical:  it is cheap to speak of them as good, great, beautiful or sublime:  these are but the appearances they assume as we look upwards at them.  What they are in themselves is:  (1) Compassionate;—­it is the law of their being to draw men upwards towards the Spirit; (2) Impersonal;—­there is a non-being or vacuity in them where we have our passions, likings, preferences, dislikes and desires.  They are, in the Chinese phrase, “the equals of Heaven and Earth”;

     “Earth, heaven, and time, death, life and they
     Endure while they shall be to be.”

So Socrates, having failed in his life-attempt to save Athens, entered with some gusto on that great coup de main of his death:  to make it a thing which first a small group of his friends should see; then that Greece should see; then that thirty coming centuries and more should see; presented it royally to posterity, for what, as a manifestation of the Divine in man, it might be worth.

And look! what is the result?  Scarcely is the ’thing of muscles and sinews’ cold:  scarcely has high Socrates forgone his queer satyr-like embodiment:  when a new luminary has risen into the firmament,—­one to shine through thirty centuries certainly,