When, after saying this, the Emperor had remained for some time silent, the youth asked him: 

“But if the sunrise teaches you nothing concerning the future why should you so often break your night’s rest and climb the mountain to see it?”

“Why?  Why?” repeated Hadrian, slowly and meditatively, stroking his grizzled beard; then he went on as if speaking to himself: 

“That is a question which reason fails to answer, before which my lips find no words; and, if I had them at my command, who among the rabble would understand me?  Such questions can best be answered by means of parables.  Those who take part in life are actors, and the world is their stage.  He who wants to look tall on it wears the cothurnus, and is not a mountain the highest vantage ground that a man can find for the sole of his foot?  Kasius there is but a hill, but I have stood on greater giants than he, and seen the clouds rise below me, like Jupiter on Olympus.”

“But you need climb no mountains to feel yourself a god,” cried Antinous; “the godlike is your title—­you command and the world must obey.  With a mountain beneath his feet a man is nearer to heaven no doubt than he is on the plain.”

“Well?”

“I dare not say what came into my mind.”

“Speak out.”

“I knew a little girl who when I took her on my shoulder would stretch out her arms and exclaim, ‘I am so tall!’ She fancied that she was taller than I then, and yet was only little Panthea.”

“But in her own conception of herself, it was she who was tall, and that decides the issue, for to each of us a thing is only that which it seems to us.  It is true they call me godlike, but I feel every day, and a hundred times a day, the limitations of the power and nature of man, and I cannot get beyond them.  On the top of a mountain I cease to feel them; there I feel as if I were great, for nothing is higher than my head, far or near.  And when, as I stand there, the night vanishes before my eyes, when the splendor of the young sun brings the world into new life for me, by restoring to my consciousness all that just before had been engulfed in gloom, then a deeper breath swells my breast, and my lungs fill with the purer and lighter air of the heights.  Up there, alone and in silence, no hint can reach me of the turmoil below, and I feel myself one with the great aspect of nature spread before me.  The surges of the sea come and go, the tree-tops in the forest bow and rise, fog and mist roll away and part asunder hither and thither, and up there I feel myself so merged with the creation that surrounds me that often it even seems as though it were my own breath that gives it life.  Like the storks and the swallows, I yearn for the distant land, and where should the human eye be more likely to be permitted, at least in fancy, to discern the remote goal than from the summit of a mountain?

“The limitless distance which the spirit craves for seems there to assume a form tangible to the senses, and the eye detects its border line.  My whole being feels not merely elevated, but expanded, and that vague longing which comes over me as soon as I mix once more in the turmoil of life, and when the cares of state demand my strength, vanishes.  But you cannot understand it, boy.  These are things which no other mortal can share with me.”