“I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.”

“You have not wasted your time; you have helped to save the world. We are not buffoons, but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy.”

“I? What am I?" roared the President, and he rose slowly to an incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch above them and break. "You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now.”

“Sirs, I am but a nameless man,A rhymester without a home,Yet since I come of the Wessex clayAnd carry the cross of Rome,I will even answer the mighty earlThat asked of Wessex menWhy they be meek and monkish folk, And bow to the White Lord's broken yoke;What sign have we save blood and smoke?Here is my answer then.That on you is fallen the shadow,And not upon the Name;That though we scatter and though we fly,And you hang over us like the sky,You are more tired of victory,Than we are tired of shame.That though you hunt the Christian man Like a hare on the hill-side,The hare has still more heart to runThan you have heart to ride.That though all lances split on you,All swords be heaved in vain,We have more lust again to loseThan you to win again.Your lord sits high in the saddle,A broken-hearted king,But our king Alfred, lost from fame,Fallen among foes or bonds of shame,In I know not what mean trade or name,Has still some song to sing.Our monks go robed in rain and snow,But the heart of flame therein,But you go clothed in feasts and flames,When all is ice within;Nor shall all iron dooms make dumbMen wandering ceaselessly,If it be not better to fast for joyThan feast for misery.Nor monkish order onlySlides down, as field to fen,All things achieved and chosen pass,As the White Horse fades in the grass,No work of Christian men.Ere the sad gods that made your godsSaw their sad sunrise pass,The White Horse of the White Horse Vale,That you have left to darken and fail,Was cut out of the grass.Therefore your end is on you,Is on you and your kings,Not for a fire in Ely fen,Not that your gods are nine or ten,But because it is only Christian menGuard even heathen things.For our God hath blessed creation,Calling it good. I knowWhat spirit with whom you blindly band Hath blessed destruction with his hand;Yet by God's death the stars shall standAnd the small apples grow.”

“We now have a strong desire for living combined with a strange carelessness about dying. We desire life like water and yet are ready to drink death like wine.”

“Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.”

“Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your religion involves that you will not reveal what I am now going to tell you to any son of Adam, and especially not to the police? Will you swear that! If you will take upon yourself this awful abnegation, if you will consent to burden your soul with a vow that you should never make and a knowledge you should never dream about, I will promise you in return—""You will promise me in return?" inquired Syme, as the other paused."I will promise you a very entertaining evening."Syme suddenly took off his hat."Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined. You say that a poet is always an anarchist. I disagree; but I hope at least that he is always a sportsman. Permit me, here and now, to swear as a Christian, and promise as a good comrade and a fellow-artist, that I will not report anything of this, whatever it is, to the police. And now, in the name of Colney Hatch, what is it?""I think," said Gregory, with placid irrelevancy, "that we will call a cab.”