that life is still burning within them.
But at last their fate is the same as that of the
gourmand and the drunkard. The power of
the spell lessens daily as the machinery which
feels loses its vitality; and the man endeavors
to revive the old excitement and fervor by
striking the note more violently, by hugging
the thing that makes him feel, by drinking
the cup of poison to its fatal dregs. And then
he is lost; madness falls on his soul, as it
falls on the body of the drunkard. Life has no
longer any meaning for him, and he rushes
wildly into the abysses of intellectual insanity.
A lesser man who commits this great folly
wearies the spirits of others by a dull clinging
to familiar thought, by a persistent hugging of
the treadmill which he asserts to be the final
goal. The cloud that surrounds him is as fatal
as death itself, and men who once sat at his
feet turn away grieved, and have to look back
at his early words in order to remember his
greatness.




VII


What is the cure for this misery and waste