The Sphinx How true, for example, is that other old Fable of the Sphinx, who sat by the wayside, propounding her riddle to the passengers, which if they could not answer she destroyed them! Such a Sphinx is this Life of ours, to all men and societies of men.

Nature, like the Sphinx, is of womanly celestial loveliness and tenderness; the face and bosom of a goddess, but ending in claws and the body of a lioness.

There is in her a celestial beauty,-- which means celestial order, pliancy to wisdom; but there is also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal.
She is a goddess, but one not yet disimprisoned; one still half-imprisoned,--the inarticulate, lovely still encased in the inarticulate, chaotic.

How true! And does she not propound her riddles to us?
Of each man she asks daily, in mild voice, yet with a terrible significance, "Knowest thou the meaning of this Day?
What thou canst do Today; wisely attempt to do ?" Nature, Universe, Destiny, Existence, howsoever we name this grand unnameable Fact in the midst of which we live and struggle, is as a heavenly bride and conquest to the wise and brave, to them who can discern her behests and do them; a destroying fiend to them who cannot.

Answer her riddle, it is well with thee.