‘And better so!’ he said, and turned away; for at that moment, watching keenly as he spoke the action of a delicate combination of movements, all made and balanced to a hair’s-breadth, there had come to him suddenly the idea of something which made it a hundredfold more strong and terrible. For they were terrible these things that lived yet did not live, which were his slaves, and moved at his will. When he had done this, he looked at me, and a smile came upon his mouth: but his eyes smiled not, nor ever changed from the set look they wore. And the words he spoke were familiar words, not his, but out of the old life. ‘What a piece of work is a man!’ he said; ‘how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?’ His mind had followed another strain of thought, which to me was bewildering, so that I did not know how to reply. I answered like a child, upon his last word. ‘We are dust no more,’ I cried, for pride was in my heart--pride of him and his wonderful strength, and his thoughts which created strength, and all the marvels he did--‘those things which hindered are removed. Go on, go on--you want but another step. What is to prevent that you should not shake the universe, and overturn this doom, and break all our bonds? There is enough here to explode this gray fiction of a firmament, and to rend those precipices and to dissolve that waste--as at the time when the primeval seas dried up, and those infernal mountains rose.’ He laughed and the echoes caught the sound and gave it back as if they mocked it. ‘There is enough to rend us all into shreds,’ he said, ‘and shake, as you say, both heaven and earth, and these plains and those hills.’ ‘Then why,’ I cried in my haste, with a dreadful hope piercing through my soul--‘why do you create and perfect, but never employ? When we had armies on the earth we used them. You have more than armies. You have force beyond the thoughts of man: but all without use as yet.’ ‘All,’ he cried, ‘for no use! All in vain!--in vain!’ ‘O master!’ I said, ‘great, and more great, in time to come. Why?--why?’ He took me by the arm and drew me close. ‘Have you strength,’ he said, ‘to bear it if I tell you why?’ I knew what he was about to say. I felt it in the quivering of my veins, and my heart that bounded as if it would escape from my breast. But I would not quail from what he did not shrink to utter. I could speak no word, but I looked him in the face and waited--for that which was more terrible than all. He held me by the arm, as if he would hold me up when the shock of anguish came. ‘They are in vain,’ he said, ‘in vain--because God rules over all.’ His arm was strong; but I fell at his feet like a dead man.