Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/163

Rh belief in the two realms is a very ancient romance and myth: we clever dwarfs, for all our will and our purposes, are molested, run down, and often trampled to death by those stupid, extremely stupid giants, the accidents—but, despite all this, we should not like to be deprived of the awful poetry of this implied in their presence; for these monsters frequently appear when life, in the cobweb of purposes, has become too slow or too anxious, giving a sublime diversion by the fact that for once their hands tear the whole web—not as if these irrational beings had wished to do so or had even noticed it. But their coarse, bony hands run through our web as though it were thin air. The Greeks called this realm of incalculable recurrences and sublime, eternal weak-mindedness, Moira, and placed it round their gods as the horizon beyond which neither their actions or their eyes could reach: with that secret defiance of the gods which is met with among several nations, in so far as they are worshipped, whilst fate is kept in hand as a last trump against them; when, for instance, Indians and Persians imagine their gods dependent on the sacrifices of mortals, thus giving to mortals the power, if worse came to the worst, to let the gods hunger and starve; or when, as with the hard, melancholy Scandinavian a quiet revenge was enjoyed in the idea of a twilight of the gods to come in retribution of the constant dread which their evil gods caused them. For otherwise Christianity, with its neither Indian, Persian, Greek, nor Scandinavian