Page:The Life of Michael Angelo.djvu/16

 And it is for that reason, Christians, that I love you, for I pity you. I pity you and admire your melancholy. You sadden the world, but you beautify it. The world will be poorer when your sorrow is no longer there. In this age of cowards, who tremble when face to face with sorrow and noisily lay claim to their right to happiness, which, as often as not, is the right to the unhappiness of others, let us have the courage to look sorrow in the face and venerate it! Blessed be joy, but blessed also be sorrow! One is the sister to the other and both are saints! They make the world and expand the souls of the great. They are strength, they are life, they are God! He who loves not both of them, loves neither the one nor the other. And he who has relished them knows the value of life and the sweetness of leaving it.

At the end of this tragic history I am tormented by a scruple. I ask myself whether, in wishing to give those who suffer companions of sorrow to support them, I have not added the sorrow of the latter to that of the former. Ought I not rather to have shown, as so many others have done, only the heroic side of the life of my hero, and to have thrown a veil over his sadness?

No! Truth above all things! I have not promised my friends happiness at the price of a lie—happiness in any and every case, at no matter what cost. I promised them truth, even at the price of happiness—virile truth which fashions eternal souls. Its breath is rough, but it is pure. Let us bathe our anaemic hearts in it.

Great souls are like mountain summits. The wind