And solemn before us, Veiled, the dark Portal, Goal of all mortal:-- Stars silent rest o'er us, Graves under us silent. While earnest thou gazest, Comes boding of terror, Comes phantasm and error, Perplexes the bravest With doubt and misgiving. But heard are the Voices,-- Heard are the Sages, The Worlds and the Ages: "Choose well, your choice is Brief and yet endless: Here eyes do regard you, In Eternity's stilness; Here is all fulness, Ye brave, to reward you; Work, and despair not." Book IV--Horoscope Chapter I Aristocracies To predict the Future, to manage the Present, would not be so impossible, had not the Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled; effaced, and what is worse, defaced! The Past cannot be seen; the Past, looked at through the medium of 'Philosophical History' in these times, cannot even be _not_ seen: it is misseen; affirmed to have existed,--and to have been a godless Impossibility. Your Norman Conquerors, true royal souls, crowned kings as such, were vulturous irrational tyrants: your Becket was a noisy egoist and hypocrite; getting his brains spilt on the floor of Canterbury Cathedral, to secure the main chance,-- somewhat uncertain how! "Enthusiasm," and even "honest Enthusiasm,"--yes, of course: 'The Dog, to gain his private ends, _Went_ mad, and bit the Man!'-- For in truth, the eye sees in all things 'what it brought with it the means of seeing.' A godless century, looking back on centuries that were godly, produces portraitures more miraculous than any other. All was inane discord in the Past; brute Force bore rule everywhere; Stupidity, savage Unreason, fitter for Bedlam than for a human World! Whereby indeed it becomes sufficiently natural that the like qualities, in new sleeker habiliments, should continue in our time to rule. Millions enchanted in Bastille Workhouses; Irish Widows proving their relationship by typhus-fever: what would you have? It was ever so, or worse. Man's History, was it not always even this: The cookery and eating up of imbecile Dupedom by successful Quackhood; the battle, with various weapons, of vulturous Quack and Tyrant against vulturous Tyrant and Quack? No God was in the Past Time; nothing but. Mechanisms and Chaotic Brute-gods:--how shall the poor 'Philosophic Historian,' to whom his own century is all godless, see any God in other centuries?