A Book of Myths, by Jean Lang - Umnet

not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its
loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor
will sigh Until its voice is echoless."
Byron.
"Yet, I am still Prometheus, wiser grown By years of solitude,--that
holds apart The past and future, giving the soul room To search into
itself,--and long commune With this eternal silence;--more a god, In
my long-suffering and strength to meet With equal front the direst
shafts of fate, Than thou in thy faint-hearted despotism ... Therefore,
great heart, bear up! thou art but type Of what all lofty spirits endure
that fain Would win men back to strength and peace through love: Each
hath his lonely peak, and on each heart Envy, or scorn or hatred tears
lifelong With vulture beak; yet the high soul is left; And faith, which is
but hope grown wise, and love And patience, which at last shall
overcome."
Lowell.
PYGMALION
In days when the world was young and when the gods walked on the
earth, there reigned over the island of Cyprus a sculptor-king, and king
of sculptors, named Pygmalion. In the language of our own day, we
should call him "wedded to his art." In woman he only saw the bane of
man. Women, he believed, lured men from the paths to which their
destiny called them. While man walked alone, he walked free--he had
given no "hostages to fortune." Alone, man could live for his art, could
combat every danger that beset him, could escape, unhampered, from
every pitfall in life. But woman was the ivy that clings to the oak, and
throttles the oak in the end. No woman, vowed Pygmalion, should ever
hamper him. And so at length he came to hate women, and, free of
heart and mind, his genius wrought such great things that he became a
very perfect sculptor. He had one passion, a passion for his art, and that
sufficed him. Out of great rough blocks of marble he would hew the