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Updated: June 25, 2025
Singing among the far hills, and rushing downward in a torrent of ecstatic life, the river had paused in the valley to rest, dreaming, perchance, of the long cool shadows in the uplands, the far altar-fires of daybreak.
“From the fields and from the vineyards Came no fruits to deck the feasts, Only flesh of bloodstained victims Smoldered on the altar-fires, And where’er the grieving goddess Turns her melancholy gaze, Sunk in vilest degradation Man his loathsomeness displays.” Mitya broke into sobs and seized Alyosha’s hand. “My dear, my dear, in degradation, in degradation now, too.
Our sense of sin is what our virtues feed upon; in the thin air of universal morality the altar-fires of honor and the beacons of conscience could not be kept alight.
There are a few of us who keep the faith, who do not bow the knee to Baal, who hold fast to what is high and good in the doctrine of political equality; in whose hearts the altar-fires of rational liberty are kept aglow, beaconing the darkness of that illimitable inane where their countrymen, inaccessible to the light, wander witless in the bogs of political unreason, alternately adoring and damning the man-made gods of their own stature.
Then the Salii stand round the lit altar-fires to sing, their brows bound with poplar boughs, one chorus of young men, one of elders, and extol in song the praises and deeds of Hercules; how first he strangled in his gripe the twin terrors, the snakes of his stepmother; how he likewise shattered in war famous cities, Troy and Oechalia; how under Eurystheus the King he bore the toil of a thousand labours by Juno's malign decrees.
The charge of it was given to the best men who could be found; and when a set of citizens went forth to make a new home or colony in Asia, Sicily, or Italy, they always took brands from this fire, guarded them carefully in a censer, and lighted their altar-fires therefrom when they settled down. These cities were of houses built round paved courts.
That the innocent should suffer such unjust banishment shocked Esther's ideas of right providence. Why were such straits permitted? Esther begins to see that the world groans beneath weight of unmerited burdens. Under fairest skies gleam sacrificial blades. Balmiest airs minister to altar-fires. Bird-carols and zephyr-murmurs are but medley variations to minor chords of vicarious pain.
The glitter of your millions once blinded me and I was on the point of surrender, but I've won out. I've entered at last to stay into the Kingdom of Mind, that lies beyond the rule of greed, where beauty, heroism, and genius have built their altar-fires and keep them burning. You'll have to come with me, Nan, into this enchanted land.
It is certain that the combined voices of such a multitude, heard at dead of night, from the depths of their eternal forests, the many fair young faces turned upward, and looking paler and lovelier as they met the moon-beams, the dark figures of the officials in the middle of the circle, the lurid glare thrown by the altar-fires on the woods beyond, did altogether produce a fine and solemn effect, that I shall not easily forget; but ere I had well enjoyed it, the scene changed, and sublimity gave place to horror and disgust.
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