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How should I reach so far, who cannot weigh

To-morrow’s dower by gage of yesterday?

Shall birth and death, and all dark names that be

As doors and windows bared to some loud sea,

Lash deaf mine ears and blind my face with spray;

And shall my sense pierce love,—the last relay

And ultimate outpost of eternity?

Lo! what am I to Love, the lord of all?

One murmuring shell he gathers from the sand,—

One little heart-flame sheltered in his hand.

Yet through thine eyes he grants me clearest call

And veriest touch of powers primordial

That any hour-girt life may understand.

D. G. Rossetti.

The gods are on the side of the strongest.

Tacitus (Hist. 4, 17).

De Rabutin, Comte de Bussy, said in 1677, “God is on the side of the heaviest battalions.” Voltaire again said, in 1770, that there are far more fools than wise men, “and they say that God always favours the heaviest battalions” (Letter to Le Riche). Gibbon wrote, “The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators” (Ch. LXVIII). (I owe part of this note to King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations.)