Hypatia - or New Foes with an Old Face

fine gentlemen, following her in reverend admiration across the street to her lecture-room, a ragged beggar-man, accompani

ble art of 'upsetting' then in vogue in the African universities, to which we all have reason enough to be thankful, seeing that it drove Saint Augustine from Carthage to Rome; and they, in compliance with the usual fashion of tormenting any simple creature who came in their wa

is frightful dog away, gentlemen!' said

'it is Aben-Ezra's. Where did you fin

arket. Fair Sybil, have you already forgotten your humblest pupil, as these young dogs have, w

disclosed the features of Raphael Aben-Ezra

stonished. At

you, sir

ments of sense. It augurs ill, surely, for your estimate either of your pupils or of your own eloq

erade, most excellent sir?' asked

wished to look once more at a certain countenance, though I have turned, as you see, Cynic; and intend henceforth to attend no teacher but my dog, who will luckily charge no fees for instruction; if she did, I must go un

fam

iriting.... and Theon's house is quite as eas

for that rascally patriarch's fancy. We will make a subscription for you, eh? And you shall liv

my butts far too long for me to think of becomin

and speaking in Syria

pupil.... My father will find some concealment for you from these wretches; and if y

orm of this opal ring. As for shelter near you,' he went on, lowering his voice, and speaking like her, in Syriac-'Hypatia the

atia, blushing scarlet

that when it becomes intolerable. But as I do not intend to leave my shell, if I can help it, except just when and how I choose, and as

ring, and escape to Synesiu

g day and night to convert me to that eclectic farrago of his, which he calls philosophic Christianity. Well, if you will no

to the philo

edonian papa, and his Macedonian mamma, and his Macedonian sisters, and horses, and parrots, and peacocks, twice over, in any slave-market in the world. Any gentleman who wishes to possess a jewel worth ten tho

n his arm was seized from behind, and the ring snatched from his hand. He turned, f

oiled again before the glare of her eye. Raphael called the

en you are getting tipsy, not even philosophers can resist, have restored the Rainbow of Solomon to its original possessor. Farewell, Queen of Philosophy! When I find the man, you shall hear of it. Mother, I am coming with you for a friend

pleased or displeased by them. But she felt, as she said, that she had lost perhaps her only true pupil; and more-perhaps her only true master. For she saw clearly enough, that under that Silenus' mask was hidden a nature capable of-perhaps more than she dare think of. She had always felt him her superior in practical cunning; and that morning had proved to her what she had long suspected, that he was possibly also her superior in that moral earnestness and strength of will for which she looked in vain among the enervated Greeks who surrounded her. And even in those matters in which he professed himself her pupil, she had long been alternately delighted by finding that he alone, of all her school, seemed thoroughly and instinctively to comprehend her ev

roblems; he looked out authorities, kept her pupils in order by his bitter tongue, and drew fresh students to her lectures by the attractions of his wit, his arguments, and last, but not least, his unrivalled cook and cellar. Above all he acted the part of a fierce and valiant watch-dog on her behalf, against the knots of clownish and often brutal sophists, the wrecks of the old Cynic, Stoic, and Academic schools, who, with venom increasing, after the won

crossed her! And now, who would take his place? Athanasius? Synesius in his good-nature might dignify him with the name of brother, but to her he was a powerless pedant, destined to die without having wrought any deliverance on the earth, as indeed the event proved. Plutarch of Athens? He was superannuated. Syrianus? A mere logician, twisting Aristotle to mean what she knew, and he ought to have known, Aristotle never meant. Her father? A man of triangles and conic sections. How paltry they all looked by the side of

as men who could act while she thought. And those were just the men whom she would find nowhere but-she knew it too well-in the hated Christian pries

audience.... What did she care for them? Would they do what she told them? She was half through her lecture before she could re

The book is here-the word which men call his. Let the thoughts thereof have been at first whose they may, now they are mine. I have taken them to myself, and thought them to myself, and made them parts of my own soul. Nay, they were and ever will be parts of me; for they, even as the poet was, even as I am, are but a part of the universal soul. What matter, then, what myths grew up around those mighty thoughts of ancient seers? Let others try to reconcile the Cyclic fragments, or vindicate the Catalogue of ships. What has the philosopher lost, though the former were proved to be contradictory, and the latter interpolated? The thoughts are there, and ours, Let us open our hearts lovingly to receive them, from whencesoever they may have come. As in men, so in books, the soul is all with which our souls must deal; and the soul of the book is whatsoever beautiful, and true, and noble we can find in it. It matters not to us whether the poet was altogether conscious of the meanings which we can find in him. Consciously or unconsciously to him, the meanings must be there; for were they not there to be seen, how could we see them? There are those among the uninitiate vulgar-and those, too, who carry under the philosophic cloak hearts still uninitiate-who revile such interpretations as

iptures cannot lie!' cried a voice

ubts, came rushing in at every sentence on his acute Greek intellect, all the more plentifully and irresistibly because his speculative faculty was as yet altogether waste and empty, undefended by any scientific culture from the inrushing flood. For the first time in his life he found himself face to face with the root-questions of all thought-'What am I, and where?' 'Wh

of the most valiant began to scramble over the benches up to him; and Philammon was congratulating himself on t

an, and knows no better; he has been taught thus. Let him sit h

by a change of tone, the thread

fit key for the reception of lofty wisdom. For well said Abamnon the Teacher, that "the soul consisted first of harmony and rhythm, and ere it gave itself to the body, had listened to the divine harmony. Therefore it is that when, after having

ear, for the first time, the mig

brothers bred with me in the halls, All in one day went down to Hades there; For all of them swift-foot Achilles slew Beside the lazy kine and snow-white sheep. And her, my mother, who of late was queen Beneath the woods of Places, he brought here Among his other spoils; yet set her free Again, receiving ransom rich and great. But Artemis, whose bow is all her joy, Smote her to death within her father's halls. Hector! so thou art father to me now, Mother, and brother, and husband fair and strong! Oh, come now, pity me, and stay thou here Upon the tower, nor make thy child an orphan And me thy wife a widow; range the men Here by the fig-tree, where the city lies Lowest, and where the wall can well be scaled; For here three times the best have tried the assault Round either Ajax, and Idomeneus, And round the Atridai both, and Tydeus' son, Whether some cunning seer taught them craft, Or their own spirit stirred and drove them on.' Then spake tall Hector, with the glancing helm All this I too have watched, my wife; yet much I hold in dread the scorn of Trojan men And Trojan women with their trailing shawls, If, like a coward, I should skulk from war. Beside, I have no lust to stay; I have learnt Aye to be bold, and lead the van of fight, To win my father, and myself, a name. For well I know, at heart and in my thought, The day will come when Ilios the holy Shall lie in heaps, and Priam, and the folk Of ashen-speared Priam, perish all. But yet no woe to come to Trojan men, Nor even to Hecabe, nor Priam king, Nor to my brothers, who shall roll in dust, M

nd Chapman failed. It is simply, I believe, impossible to render Homer into English verse; because, for one reason among many, it is impossible to preserve the pomp of sound, which invests with grandeur

monplaces as a mother's brute affection, and the terrors of an infant? Surely the deeper insight of the philos

f mothers, with weak indulgences; fearing to send us forth into the great realities of speculation, there to forget her in the pursuit of glory, she would have us while away our prime within the harem, and play for ever round her knees. And has not the elect soul a father, too, whom it knows not? Hector, he who is without-unconfined, unconditioned by Nature, yet its husband?-the all-pervading, plastic Soul, informing, organising, whom men call Zeus the lawgiver, Aether

o itself, and clasping to its bosom the beautiful, and all wherein it discovers its own reflex; impressing on it its signature, reproducing from it its own likeness, whether star, or daemon, or soul of the elect:-and yet, as the poet hints in anthropomorphic language, haunted all the w

roar of the Nile-flood, sweeping down fertility in every wave-in the awful depths of the temple-shrine-in the wild melodies of old Orphic singers, or before the images of those gods of whose perfect beauty the divine theosophists of Greece caught a fleeting shadow, and with the sudden might of artistic ecstasy smote it, as by an enchanter's wand, into an eternal sleep of snowy stone-in these there flashes on the inner eye a vision beautiful and terrible, of a force

or the time, this burden of individuality vanishes, and recognising themselves as portions of the universal Soul, they rise upward, through and beyond that Reason from whence the soul proceeds, to the fount of all-the ineffable and Supreme One-and seeing It, become by that act portions of Its essence. They speak no more, but It speaks in them, and their whole being, transmuted by that glorious sunlight into whose rays they have dared, like the eagle, to gaze without shrinking, becomes an harmonious vehicle for the words of Deity, and passive itself, utters the secrets of the immortal gods! What wonder if to the brute mass they seem as dreamers? Be it so.... Smile if you will. But ask me not to teach you things unspeakable, above all sciences, which the word-battle of dialectic, the discursive struggles of reason, can never reach, but which must be seen only, and when seen confessed to be unspeaka

rapture. She remained for a moment motionless, gazing earnestly at her audience, as if in hopes of exciting in

s she is after all-the shame of finding that she has given you too much, and lifted the veil o

l of her voice was taken off him, sprang up, and h

ulf between them so infinite? If so, why had her aspirations awakened echoes in his own heart-echoes too, just such as the prayers and lessons of the Laura used to awaken? If the fruit was so like, must not the root be like also?.... Could that be a c

e fifty yards up the street, his little friend of the fruit-basket, whom he had not seen since he vanished under t

ho least deserve them! Rash and insolent ru

ent to renew his acquaintance with the little porter. But

minated-I the appreciating-I the obedient-I the adoring-who for these three years past have grov

you want,

sent me-breathless at once with running and

is Th

llow rushed back again, while Philammon, at his wits' end between dread and longing, started off, and ran the whole way home to the Serapeium, regardless of carriages, elephants, and foot-passengers; and having been knocked down by a su