Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know; that they do not touch him;—­but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul.  If he escapes them in one part, they attack him in another more vital part.  If he has escaped them in form, and in the appearance, it is because he has resisted his life, and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much death.  So signal is the failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good from the tax, that the experiment would not be tried,—­since to try it is to be mad,—­but for the circumstance, that when the disease began in the will, of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensual allurement of an object, and not see the sensual hurt; he sees the mermaid’s head, but not the dragon’s tail; and thinks he can cut off that which he would have, from that which he would not have.  “How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied Providence certain penal blindnesses upon such as have unbridled desires!"[111]

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation.  It finds a tongue in literature unawares.  Thus the Greeks called Jupiter,[112] Supreme Mind; but having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they involuntarily made amends to reason, by tying up the hands[113] of so bad a god.  He is made as helpless as a king of England.[114] Prometheus[115] knows one secret which Jove must bargain for; Minerva,[116] another.  He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of them.

   “Of all the gods, I only know the keys
    That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
    His thunders sleep.”

A plain confession of the in-working of the All, and of its moral aim.  The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it would seem impossible for any fable to be invented to get any currency which was not moral.  Aurora[117] forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though Tithonus is immortal, he is old, Achilles[118] is not quite invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis held him.  Siegfried,[119] in the Niebelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon’s blood, and that spot which it covered is mortal.  And so it must be.  There is a crack in everything God has made.  It would seem, there is always this vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares, even into the wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted to make bold holiday, and to shake itself free of the old laws,—­this back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in nature nothing can be given, all things are sold.