Ay, reader, the Sphinx puts close questions now and then; but there is only one answer that can satisfy her or avert death. This person,--the only real mystery which can exist for you,--of all things the most familiar, and at the same the most unfamiliar,--is yourself! You need not speak in whispers. It is true, this lady has a golden quiver as well as a golden distaff; but her arrows are all for those who cannot solve her riddle.
Protagoras, then, was right; and, looking back through these twenty-two centuries, we nod assent to his grand proposition: "Man is the measure of all things,--of the possible, how it is,--of the impossible, how it is not." In the individual life are laid the foundations of the universe, and upon each individual artist depend the symmetry and meaning of the constructed whole. This Master-Artist it is who holds the keys of life and death; and whatsoever he shall bind or loose in his consciousness shall be bound or loosed throughout the universe. Apart from him, Nature is resolved into an intangible, shapeless vanity of silence and darkness,--without a name, and, in fact, no Nature at all. To man, all Nature must be human in some soul. God himself is worshipped under a human phase; and it is here that Christianity, the flower of all Faith, furnishes the highest answer and realization of this world-riddle of the Sphinx,--here that it rests its eternal Truth, even as here it secures its unfailing appeal to the human heart!
The process by which any nature is _realized_ is the process by which it is _humanized_. Thus are all things given to us for an inheritance. Let it be, that, apart from us, the universe sinks into insignificance and nothingness; _to_ us it is a royal possession; and we are all kings, with a dominion as unlimited as our desire. _Ubi Cæsar, ibi Roma!_ Rome is the world; and each man, if he will, is Cæsar.
_If he will_;--ay, there's the rub! In the strength of his will lie glory and absolute sway. But if he fail, then becomes evident the frailty of his tenure,--"he is a king of shreds and patches!"
Here is the crying treachery; and thus it happens that there are slaves and craven hearts. This is the profound pathos of history, (for the Sphinx has always more or less of sadness in her face,) which enters so inevitably into all human triumphs. The monuments of Egypt, the palaces and tombs of her kings,--revelations of the strength of will,--also by inevitable suggestions call to our remembrance successive generations of slaves and their endless toil. Morn after morn, at sunrise, for thousands of years, did Memnon breathe forth his music, that his name might be remembered upon the earth; but his music was the swell of a broken harp, and his name was whispered in mournful silence! Among the embalmed dead, in urn-burials, in the midst of catacombs, and among the graves upon our hillsides and in our valleys, there lurks the same sad mockery. Surely "purple Death and the strong Fates do conquer us!" Strangely, in vast solitudes, comes over us a sense of desolation, when even the faintest adumbrations of life seem lost in the inertia of mortality. In all pomp lurks the pomp of funeral; and we do now and then pay homage to the grim skeleton king who sways this dusty earth,--yea, who sways our hearts of dust!