The Emperor | Page 5

risen."
"Ah! before that you did not notice it, for till then you were busy
thinking of the stars."
"And you only of yourself--very true."
"I was thinking of your health too when that cold wind rose before
Helios appeared."
"I was obliged to await his rising."
"And can you discern future events by the way and manner of the rising
of the sun?"
Hadrian looked in surprise at the speaker, shook his head in negation,
looked up at the top of the tent, and after a long pause said, in abrupt
sentences, with frequent interruptions:
"Day is the present merely, and the future is evolved out of darkness;
the corn grows from the clods of the field; the rain falls from the
darkest clouds; a new generation is born of the mother's womb; the
limbs recover their vigor in sleep. And what is begotten of the darkness
of death--who can tell?"
When, after saying this, the Emperor had remained for some time silent,
the youth asked him:
"But if the sunrise teaches you nothing concerning the future why
should you so often break your night's rest and climb the mountain to

see it?"
"Why? Why?" repeated Hadrian, slowly and meditatively, stroking his
grizzled beard; then he went on as if speaking to himself:
"That is a question which reason fails to answer, before which my lips
find no words; and, if I had them at my command, who among the
rabble would understand me? Such questions can best be answered by
means of parables. Those who take part in life are actors, and the world
is their stage. He who wants to look tall on it wears the cothurnus, and
is not a mountain the highest vantage ground that a man can find for the
sole of his foot? Kasius there is but a hill, but I have stood on greater
giants than he, and seen the clouds rise below me, like Jupiter on
Olympus."
"But you need climb no mountains to feel yourself a god," cried
Antinous; "the godlike is your title--you command and the world must
obey. With a mountain beneath his feet a man is nearer to heaven no
doubt than he is on the plain."
"Well?"
"I dare not say what came into my mind."
"Speak out."
"I knew a little girl who when I took her on my shoulder would stretch
out her arms and exclaim, 'I am so tall!' She fancied that she was taller
than I then, and yet was only little Panthea."
"But in her own conception of herself, it was she who was tall, and that
decides the issue, for to each of us a thing is only that which it seems to
us. It is true they call me godlike, but I feel every day, and a hundred
times a day, the limitations of the power and nature of man, and I
cannot get beyond them. On the top of a mountain I cease to feel them;
there I feel as if I were great, for nothing is higher than my head, far or
near. And when, as I stand there, the night vanishes before my eyes,
when the splendor of the young sun brings the world into new life for

me, by restoring to my consciousness all that just before had been
engulfed in gloom, then a deeper breath swells my breast, and my lungs
fill with the purer and lighter air of the heights. Up there, alone and in
silence, no hint can reach me of the turmoil below, and I feel myself
one with the great aspect of nature spread before me. The surges of the
sea come and go, the tree-tops in the forest bow and rise, fog and mist
roll away and part asunder hither and thither, and up there I feel myself
so merged with the creation that surrounds me that often it even seems
as though it were my own breath that gives it life. Like the storks and
the swallows, I yearn for the distant land, and where should the human
eye be more likely to be permitted, at least in fancy, to discern the
remote goal than from the summit of a mountain?
"The limitless distance which the spirit craves for seems there to
assume a form tangible to the senses, and the eye detects its border line.
My whole being feels not merely elevated, but expanded, and that
vague longing which comes over me as soon as I mix once more in the
turmoil of life, and when the cares of state demand my strength,
vanishes. But you cannot understand it, boy. These are things which no
other mortal can share with me."
"And it is only to me that you do not scorn to reveal them!" cried
Antinous, who had