or of Jaques'

"All the world's a stage

And all the men and women merely players,"

he writes his view of the world's great drama as seen from the halfpessimist, half-pantheistic, stand-point,

"We are no other than a moving row

Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go,
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;
But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days,

Hither and thither moves, and checks and stays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays."

Koheleth's complaint that there is "no new thing under the sun" (Eccl. i. 9), that the course of Nature and of human life presents but a dreary monotony of iteration (Eccl. i. 5, 6, 14), oppresses him once more with a despair for which the wine-cup seems the only remedy: he knows not either the 'whence?' the 'whither?' or the 'why?' of life.

"Yesterday, this Day's Madness did prepare;
To-morrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair:

Drink for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where."

In words which remind us of Heine, at once in their faint hope, and in the bold despair which equals almost the "Tantå stat proedita culpâ" of Lucretius, he utters his last words to the Eternal, whom he can neither wholly deny nor yet trust in and adore,

"What! out of senseless Nothing to provoke
A conscious Something to resent the Yoke
Of unpermitted Pleasure, under pain

Of Everlasting Penalties if broke!

What! from his helpless Creature be repaid
Pure Gold, for what He lent him dross-allay'd—
Sue for a debt he never did contract

And cannot answer-Oh the sorry trade!

Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,

Thou wilt not with Predestin'd Evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to sin!

Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:

For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd, -Man's forgiveness give-and take."

In this instance also, as in those of Koheleth, Jaques, Hamlet, Heine, Schopenhauer, and a thousand others, the pessimism, selfconscious and self-contemplative, finding free utterance in the play of imagination or of humour, did not lead to suicide, but to the effort, after the manner of Epicureans less noble than Lucretius, to narcotise the sense of wretchedness by the stimulation of the wine-cup. In words which half remind us of some of Heine's most cynical utterances and half of the epitaph said to have been placed on the tomb of Sophocles, he gives free vent to his thoughts as to the hard theory of destiny that had been pressed upon him under the form of the old parable of the Potter and the clay, and his refuge from those thoughts in the revelry which was rounded by the sleep of death,

"Why,' said another, 'Some there are who tell
Of One who threatens He will send to Hell
The luckless Pots He marred in making;-Pish!
He's a Good Fellow, and 'twill all be well'1.
'Well,' murmured one. 'Let whoso make or buy,
My Clay with long Oblivion is gone dry:

But fill me with the old familiar juice;
Methinks I might recover by and by.

'Ah, with the Grape my fading Life provide,
Ah, wash the Body whence the Life has died,
And lay me, shrouded in the living Leaf,
By some not-unfrequented Garden-side.

That ev'n my buried Ashes such a snare
Of Vintage shall fling up into the Air
As not a true believer passing by

But shall be overtaken unaware.'

Beyond this we need not go. The life of Omar Khayyam, so far as we know, did not end, as we have seen reason to believe that that of Koheleth, and even of Heine, did, in a return to truer thoughts of the great enigma. It will be admitted, however, that it is not without interest to trace, under so many varieties of form and culture, the identity of thought and feeling to which an undisciplined imagination, brooding over that enigma and seeking refuge, in sensual indulgence, from the thought that it is insoluble, sooner or later leads. The poets and thinkers of the world might, indeed, almost be classified according to the relation in which they stand, to that world-problem which Reason finds itself thus impotent to solve. Some there are, like Homer, and the unknown author of the Nibelungen Lied, who in their healthy objectivity seem never to have known its burden. Some, like Eschylus, Dante, Milton, Keble, have been protected against its perilous attacks by the faith which they had inherited and to which they clung without the shadow of a doubt. Some, like Epicurus him1 Comp. Heine's words not long before his death "Dieu me pardonnera; c'est son metier.

self, and Montaigne, have rested in a supreme tranquillity. Some, like Sophocles, Virgil, Shakespeare, Goethe, have passed through it, not to the serenity of a clearer faith, but to the tranquillity of the Supreme Artist, dealing with it as an element in their enlarged experience. Some, like Lucretius, Omar Khayyam, Leopardi, and in part Heine, have yielded to its fatal spell, and have "died and made no sign" after nobler or ignobler fashion. Others, to whom the world owes more, have fought and overcome, and have rested in the faith of a Divine Order which will at last assert itself, of a Divine Education, of which the existence of the enigma, as forming part of man's probation and discipline, is itself a material element. Of this victory, the writer of the Book of Job, and Tennyson, present the earliest and the latest phases. An intermediate position may be claimed, not the less poetical in essence because its outward form was not that of poetry, for the writer of Ecclesiastes as in later times for the Pensées of Pascal.