mind was ready to be born.

It had its origin in the reading of history, and the fronting of old
tyranny in its cruel forms. Thyrsis had come to hate Christianity
for many things by that time, but most of all he hated it because it
taught the bastard virtue of Obedience. Thyrsis obeyed no man--he
lived his life; and the fiery ardor with which he lived it was
taking form in his mind as a personality. He was dreaming a hero who
should be _Resistance_ incarnate; the passionate assertion of man's
right and of man's defiance.

It was in the days of ferocity in Italy, the days of the despot and
the bravo; and Thyrsis' hero was a minstrel, a mighty musician whose
soul was free. And he sung in the despot's hall, and wooed the
despot's daughter. This was the minstrel of "Zulieka"---

"His ladder of song was slight,
But it reached to her window's height;
Each verse so frail was the silken rail,
From which her soul took flight."

Thyrsis went about quite drunk with the burning words with which the
minstrel won the lady, and tore her free from the mockeries of
convention, and that divinity that doth hedge about a princess. He
bore her away, locked tightly in his arms, and all his own--into the
great lonely mountains; and there lived the minstrel and the
princess, the lord and the lady of an outlaw band. But the outlaws
were cruel, and the minstrel sought goodness; and so there was a
struggle, and he and the lady went yet deeper into the black forest,
where they dwelt alone in a hut, he a prince of hunters and she a