[The same glen. Æsculapius alone, busily arranging a great cluster of herbs which he has collected. He sits on a large stone, with his treasures around him.]

Æsculapius.

Yew—an excellent styptic. Tansy, rosemary. Spurge and marsh mallow. The best pellitory I ever plucked out of a wall. The herbs of this glen are admirable. They surpass those of the gorges of Cyllene. Is this lavender? The scent seems more acrid.

[Enter Pallas and Euterpe.]

Pallas.

You look enviably animated, Æsculapius. Your countenance is so fresh beneath that long white beard of yours, that the barbarians will suppose you to be some mad boy, masquerading.

Euterpe.

What will you do with these plants?

Æsculapius.

These are my simples. As we shot through the Iberian narrows on our frantic voyage hither, my entire store was blown out of my hands and away to sea. The rarest sorts were flung about on rocks where nothing more valetudinarian than a baboon could possibly taste them. My earliest care on arriving here was to search these woods for fresh specimens, and my success has been beyond all hope. See, this comes from the wet lands on the hither side of the tarn——

Euterpe.

Where Selene is now searching for the wizard who draws the smoke away from the moon's face at night.

Æsculapius.

This from the beck where it rushes down between the stems of mountain-ash, this from beneath the vast ancestral elm below the palace, this from the sea-shore. Marvellous! And I am eager to descend again; I have not explored the cliff which breaks the descent of the torrent, nor the thicket in the gully. There must be marchantia under the spray of the one, and possibly dittany in the peat of the other.

Pallas.

We must not detain you, Æsculapius. But tell us how you propose to adapt yourself to our new life. It seems to me that you are determined not to find it irksome.

Æsculapius.

Does it not occur to you, Pallas, that—although I should never have had the courage to adopt it—thus forced upon us it offers me the most dazzling anticipations? Hitherto my existence has been all theory. What there is to know about the principles of health as applied to the fluctuations of mortality, I may suppose is known to me. You might be troubled, Pallas, with every conceivable malady, from elephantiasis to earache, and I should be in a position to analyse and to deal with each in turn. You might be obscured by ophthalmia, crippled by gout or consumed to a spectre by phthisis, and I should be able, without haste, without anxiety, to unravel the coil, to reduce the nodosities, to make the fleshy instrument respond in melody to all your needs.

Pallas.

But you have never done this. We knew that you could do it, and that has been enough for us.

Æsculapius.

It has never been enough for me. The impenetrable immortality of all our bodies has been a constant source of exasperation to me.

Pallas.

Is it not much to know?

Æsculapius.

Yes; but it is more to do. The most perfect theory carries a monotony and an emptiness about with it, if it is never renovated by practice. In Olympus the unbroken health of all the inmates, which we have accepted as a matter of course, has been more advantageous to them than it has been to me.

Pallas.

I quite see that it has made your position a more academic one than you could wish.

Æsculapius.

It has made it purely academic, and indeed, Pallas, if you will reflect upon it, the very existence of a physician in a social system which is eternally protected against every species of bodily disturbance borders upon the ridiculous.

Pallas.

It would interest me to know whether in our old home you were conscious of this incongruity, of this lack of harmony between your science and your occasions of using it.

Æsculapius.

No; I think not. I was satisfied in the possession of exact knowledge, and not directly aware of the charm of application. It is the result, no doubt, of this resignation of immortality which has startled and alarmed us all so much——

Pallas.

Me, Æsculapius, it has neither alarmed nor startled.

Æsculapius.

I mean that while we were beyond the dread of any attack, the pleasure of rebutting such attack was unknown to us. I have divined, since our misfortunes, that disease itself may bring an excitement with it not all unallied to pleasure.... You smile, Euterpe, but I mean even for the sufferer. There is more in disease than the mere pang and languishment. There is the sense of alleviation, the cessation of the throb, the resuming glitter in the eye, the restoration of cheerfulness and appetite. These, Pallas, are qualities which are indissolubly identified with pain and decay, and which therefore—if we rightly consider—were wholly excluded from our experience. In Olympus we never brightened, for we never flagged; we never waited for a pang to subside, nor felt it throbbing less and less poignantly, nor, as if we were watching an enemy from a distance, hugged ourselves in a breathless ecstasy as it faded altogether; this exquisite experience was unknown to us, for we never endured the pang.

Euterpe.

You make me eager for an illness. What shall it be? Prescribe one for me. I am ignorant even of the names of the principal maladies. Let it be a not unbecoming one.

Æsculapius.

Ah! no, Euterpe. Your mind still runs in the channel of your lost impermeability. Till now, you might fling yourself from the crags of Tartarus, or float, like a trail of water-plants, on the long, blown flood of the altar-flame, and yet take no hurt, being imperishable. But now, part of your hourly occupation, part of your faith, your hope, your duty, must be to preserve your body against the inroads of decay.

Euterpe.

You present us with a tedious conception of our new existence, surely.

Æsculapius.

Why should it be tedious? There was tedium, rather, in the possession of bodies as durable as metal, as renewable as wax, as insensitive as water. In the fiercest onset of the passions, prolonged to satiety, there was always an element of the unreal. What is pleasure, if the strain of it is followed by no fatigue; what the delicacy of taste, if we can eat like caverns and drink like conduits without being vexed by the slightest inconvenience? You will discover that one of the acutest enjoyments of the mortal state will be found to consist in guarding against suffering. If you are provided with balloons attached to all your members, you float upon the sea with indifference. It is the certainty that you will drown if you do not swim which gives zest to the exercise. I climb along yonder jutting cornice of the cliff with eagerness, and pluck my simples with a hand that trembles more from joy than fear, precisely because the strain of balancing the nerves, and the certainty of suffering as the result of carelessness, knit my sensations together into an exaltation which is not exactly pleasure, perhaps, but which is not to be distinguished from it in its exciting properties.

Pallas.

Is life, then, to resolve itself for us into a chain of exhilarating pangs?

Æsculapius.

Life will now be for you, for all of us, a perpetual combat with a brine that half supports, half drags us under; a continual creeping and balancing on a chamois path around the forehead of a precipice. A headache will be the breaking of a twig, a fever a stone that gives way beneath your foot, to lose the use of an organ will be to let the alpenstock slip out of your starting fingers. And the excitement, and be sure the happiness, of existence will be to protract the struggle as long as possible, to push as far as you can along the dwindling path, to keep the supports and the alleviations of your labour about you as skilfully as you can, and in the fuss and business of the little momentary episodes of climbing to forget as long and as fully as may be the final and absolutely unavoidable plunge. [A pause, during which Euterpe sinks upon the green sward.]

Æsculapius.

I have unfolded before you a scheme of philosophical activity. Are you not gratified?

Pallas.

Euterpe will learn to be gratified, Æsculapius, but she had not reflected upon the plunge. If she will take my counsel, she will continue to avoid doing so. [Euterpe rises, and approaches Pallas, who continues, to Æsculapius.] I am with you in recommending to her a constant consideration of the momentary episodes of health. And now let us detain you no longer from the marchanteas.

Euterpe.

But pray recollect that they grow where the rocks are both slippery and shelving.

[Exit Æsculapius. Euterpe sinks again upon the grass, with her face in her hands, and lies there motionless. Pallas walks up and down, in growing emotion, and at length breaks forth in soliloquy.]

Pallas.

Higher than this dull circle of the sense— Shrewd though its pulsing sharp reminders be, With ceaseless fairy blows that ring and wake The anvil of the brain—I rather choose To lift mine eyes and pierce The long transparent bar that floats above, And hides, or feigns to hide, the choiring stars, And dulls, or faintly dulls, the fiery sun, And lacquers all the glassy sky with gold. For so the strain that makes this mortal life Irksome or squalid, chains that bind us down, Rust on those chains which soils the reddening skin, Passes; and in that concentrated calm, And in that pure concinnity of soul, And in that heart that almost fails to beat, I read a faint beatitude, and dream I walk once more upon the roof of Heaven, And feel all knowledge, all capacity For sovereign thought, all intellectual joy, Blow on me, like fluttering and like dancing winds. We are fallen, fallen!... And yet a nameless mirth, flooding my veins, And yet a sense of limpid happiness And buoyancy and anxious fond desire Quicken my being. It is much to see The perfected geography of thought Spread out before the gorged intelligence, A map from further detail long absolved. But ah! when we have tasted the delight Of toilsome apprehension, how return To that satiety of mental ease Where all is known because it merely is? Nay, here the joy will be to learn and learn, To learn in error and correct in pain, To learn through effort and with ease forget, Building of rough and slippery stones a House, Long schemed, and falling from us, and at the last Imperfect. Knowledge not the aim, so much As pleasure in the toil that leads to knowledge, We shall build, although the house before our eyes Crumble, and we shall gladden in the toil Although it never leads to habitation— Building our goal, though never a fabric rise.

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