“Brighter than Jupiter—­a blazing star
     Brighter than Hesper shining out to sea”

—­one that is still to be splendid in the heavens wherever in Europe, wherever in America, wherever in the whole vast realm of the future men are to arise and make question and peer up into the beautiful skies of the Soul.  A Phoenix in time has arisen from the ashes of Socrates:  from the glory and solemnity of his death a Voice is mystically created that shall go on whispering The Soul wherever men think and strive towards spirituality.  —­Ah indeed, you were no failure, Socrates—­you who were disappointed of your Critias, your Charmides, your Alcibiades, your whole Athens; you were not anything in the very least like a failure; for there was yet one among your disciples—­

He says, that one, that he was absent through illness during that last scene of his Teacher’s life.  I do not know; it has been thought that may have been merely a pretense, an artistic convention, to give a heightened value of impersonality to his marvelous prose:—­for it was he who wrote down the account of the death of Socrates for us:  that tragedy so transcendent in its beauty and lofty calm.  But this much is certain:  that day he was born again:  became, from a gilded youth of Athens, an eternal luminary in the heavens, and that which he has remained these three-and-twenty hundred years:  the Poet-Philosopher of the Soul, the Beacon of the Spirit for the western world....

He had been a brilliant young aristocrat among the crowd that loved to talk with Socrates:  the very best thing that Athens could produce in the way of birth, charm, talent, and attainments;—­it is a marvel to see one so worshiped of Fortune in this world, turn so easily to become her best adored in the heaven of the Soul.  On his father’s side he was descended from Codrus, last king of Athens; on his mother’s, from Solon:  you could get nothing higher in the way of family and descent.  In himself, he was an accomplished athlete; a brilliant writer of light prose; a poet of high promise when the mood struck him—­ and he had ideas of doing the great thing in tragedy presently; trained unusually well in music, and in mathematics; deeply read; with a taste for the philosophies; a man, in short, of culture as deep and balanced as his social standing was high.  But it seemed as though the Law had brought all these excellencies together mainly to give the fashionable Athenian world assurance of a man; for here he was in his thirty-first year with nothing much achieved beyond—­his favorite pursuit—­the writing of mimes for the delectation of his set:  “close studies of little social scenes and conversations, seen mostly in the humorous aspect.” * He had consorted much with Socrates; at the trial, when it was suggested that a fine might be paid, and the hemlock evitated, it was he who had first subscribed and gone about to raise a sum.  But now the death of his friend and Teacher struck him like a great gale amidships; and he was transformed, another man; and the great Star Plato rose, that shines still; the great Voice Plato was lifted to speak for the Soul and to be unequaled in that speaking, in the west, until H.P.  Blavatsky came.