mentia, Concordia, and other types of beneficent impulse—divine projections of human desire and unfulfilled hope.
There is a truth for the imagination in all the myths of religion and in all the fables of the poets. Homer tells us that Ulysses sailed to the limits of the world and poured out the blood of sheep, and up from the darkness of Erebus came clamoring the frustrate ghosts of Teresias and Agamemnon, and the shades of many pale passionate women who had fared tragically in their mortal life. Even so, whenever imagination unseals the gate, there return, clamoring for the light and warmth of mortal life, there return the pale frustrate ghosts of Fides, Clementia, and Concordia clamoring for incarnation. And, with their coming, one feels the rushing current of an impulse, like a mighty wind that has blown from eternity, the impulse of the unappeased human passion for perfection. And when the wind of this impulse strikes upon a man with imagination barbaric and carnal, he burns with a desire to erect palaces, and coliseums, and towering pyramids; and he prophesies like the mad King Herod:
To be a counter-glory to the sun.
There shall the eagle blindly dash himself,
