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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Lectures Delivered in America in 1874, by
+Charles Kingsley, Edited by Fanny Kingsley
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Lectures Delivered in America in 1874
+
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+Editor: Fanny Kingsley
+
+Release Date: January 12, 2010  [eBook #30944]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES DELIVERED IN AMERICA IN
+1874***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1875 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+                            LONDON: PRINTED BY
+                 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
+                          AND PARLIAMENT STREET
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 LECTURES
+                           DELIVERED IN AMERICA
+                                 IN 1874
+
+
+                                    BY
+                     CHARLES KINGSLEY, F.L.S., F.G.S.
+
+                 RECTOR OF EVERSLEY: CANON OF WESTMINSTER
+        CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN AND THE PRINCE OF WALES
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  LONDON
+                         LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
+                                   1875
+
+                          _All rights reserved_
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATION.
+
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                    TO
+                       CYRUS FIELD, J. A. C. GRAY,
+            AND ALL THOSE VALUED AMERICAN FRIENDS WHO WELCOMED
+                    MY HUSBAND TO THEIR GREAT COUNTRY,
+            AND THROUGH WHOSE GENEROUS KINDNESS HE WAS ENABLED
+                       IN THE LAST YEAR OF HIS LIFE
+                    TO REALISE THE DREAMS OF HIS YOUTH
+         BY THE SIGHT, NOT ONLY OP THE EASTERN STATES AND CITIES,
+                BUT OF THE FAR WEST, THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS,
+                        AND THE YO SEMITE VALLEY,
+             I DEDICATE THESE LECTURES WITH DEEPEST GRATITUDE
+
+                               In Memoriam.
+
+                                                        FANNY E. KINGSLEY.
+
+BYFLEET: _August_ 1875.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+LECT.                                               PAGE
+        I.  WESTMINSTER ABBEY                          1
+       II.  THE STAGE AS IT WAS ONCE                  32
+      III.  THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA            65
+       IV.  THE SERVANT OF THE LORD                   98
+        V.  ANCIENT CIVILISATION                     125
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE I.
+WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
+
+
+Reverence for age, at least so it has long seemed to me, reverence for
+age, I say, is a fair test of the vigour of youth; and, conversely,
+insolence toward the old and the past, whether in individuals or in
+nations, is a sign rather of weakness than of strength.  And the cause, I
+think, is this.  The rich and strong young natures, which feel themselves
+capable of original thought and work, have a corresponding respect for
+those who, in the generations gone by, have thought and worked as they
+hope to do hereafter.  And this temper, understand me, so far from being
+servile, or even merely conservative, usually accompanies true
+independence of spirit.  The young athlete, like the young race-horse,
+does not despise, but emulate, his sire; even though the old victor be
+long past his prime.  The young soldier admires the old general; the
+young midshipman the old admiral, just in proportion as he himself is
+likely to be a daring and able officer hereafter.  The son, when grown to
+man's estate, may say to his father, I look on you still with all respect
+and admiration.  I have learnt, and desire always, to learn from you.
+But you must be to me now, not a dictator, but an example.  You became
+what you are by following your own line; and you must let me rival you,
+and do you honour, by following mine.
+
+This, I believe, is true of nations as well as of individuals.  I do not
+hesitate to say that, paradoxical as it may seem, the most original
+races--those who have succeeded best and left their stamp most broadly
+and permanently on the human race--have also been the most teachable,
+provided they were allowed to learn in their own way and to adapt to
+their own purposes any higher ancient civilisation with which they came
+in contact.  What more striking instances of this truth--for truth it
+is--than the reverence of the free Republican Greek for the old despotic
+civilisation of Egypt? and of the free Norseman, our own ancestor, for
+the old and equally despotic civilisation of Rome?
+
+These--the two most originative and most progressive races of Europe--had
+a faith in, an awe of, the supposed or real wisdom of the men of old
+time, which was often exaggerated into a superstition; but never--thanks
+to their own innate force--degenerated into a bondage.
+
+Pardon me this somewhat dry prooemium; and pardon me, too, if it leads me
+on to a compliment to the American people, which I trust you will not
+think impertinent.
+
+For I have seen, and seen with joy, a like spirit in those Americans whom
+it has been my good fortune to meet in my own land.  I mean this:--That I
+found in them, however self-teaching and self-determining they might be,
+that genial reverence for antiquity which I hold to be the sign of a
+truly generous--that is in the right sense of the grand old word--a truly
+high-bred, nature.  I have been touched, and deeply touched, at finding
+so many of them, on landing for the first time at Liverpool, hurrying off
+to our quaint old city of Chester to gaze on its old girdle of walls and
+towers; Roman, Mediaeval, Caroline; its curious 'Rows' of overhanging
+houses; its fragments of Roman baths and inscriptions; its modest little
+Cathedral; and the--really very few--relics of English history which it
+contains.  Even two banners of an old Cheshire regiment which had been in
+the Peninsular war were almost as interesting, to some, as an illuminated
+Bible of the early Middle Age.  More than once have I had to repress the
+enthusiasm of some charming lady and say, 'But this is nothing.  Do not
+waste your admiration here.  Go on.  See the British Museum, its marbles
+and its manuscripts--See the French Cathedrals; the ruins of Provence and
+Italy; the galleries of Florence, Naples, Rome.'
+
+'Ah, but you must remember,' was the answer, 'these are the first old
+things I ever saw.'
+
+A mere sentiment?  Yes: but as poets know, and statesmen ought to know,
+it is by sentiment, when well directed--as by sorrow, when well used--by
+sentiment, I say, great nations live.  When sentiment dies out, and mere
+prosaic calculation of loss and profit takes its place, then comes a
+Byzantine epoch, a Chinese epoch, decrepitude, and slow decay.
+
+And so the eagerness of those generous young souls was to me a good
+augury for the future, of them, and of their native land.  They seemed to
+me--and I say again it touched me, often deeply--to be realising to
+themselves their rightful place in the community of the civilised nations
+of all lands, and of all times--realising to themselves that they were
+indeed
+
+    Heirs of all the ages, foremost in the ranks of time;
+
+and minded, therefore, like wise and noble heirs, not to despise and
+squander, but to treasure and to use that inheritance, and the
+accumulated labours of the mighty dead.
+
+I saw this, I say, at Chester.  And therefore I was not surprised to find
+the pleasant experience repeated, and to even a higher degree, at
+Westminster.  A pleasant experience, I say.  I know few more agreeable
+occupations than showing a party of Americans round our own great Abbey;
+and sentimentalising, if you will, in sympathy with them, over England's
+Pantheon.
+
+I pause to confess once more that it is almost an impertinence in me to
+pay you such a compliment.  You have a right to answer me--How could it
+be otherwise?--Are we not educated people?  Has not our taste been
+trained by native authors, who were at least civilised enough to value
+the great past, without the need of any European crossing the seas to
+tell us of its wealth?
+
+If you reprove me thus, I can but say that the reproof is just, and will
+remain just, as long as your poets are what they are; and as long, above
+all, as you reverence as much in America as we do in England, the poetry
+of Mr. Longfellow.  He has not, if I recollect aright, ever employed his
+muse in commemorating our great Abbey; but that muse is instinct with all
+those lofty and yet tender emotions which the sight of that great Abbey
+should call out.  He knows, as few know on our side of the wide water,
+the effect, chastening and yet ennobling, of such architecture,
+consecrated by such associations.  He has not only perceived and drank in
+all that is purest and noblest in the now sleeping last ten centuries:
+but he has combined it, again and again, with that which is purest and
+noblest in the waking and yearning present; and combined it organically
+and livingly, as leaf and stem combines with flower and fruit.  Yes; as
+long as the poet who could write both the _Belfry of Bruges_ and _The
+Village Blacksmith_ is read among you, there is no need for me to bid you
+reverence the past; and little need, I trust, for me to tell those whom I
+leave at home to reverence the present.  For it is a fact--of which some
+Americans may not be as well aware as they should be--that your exquisite
+poet has exercised an influence in Britain it may be as great as, and
+certainly more varied than, that which he has exercised in his native
+land.  With us--as, I presume, with you--he has penetrated into thousands
+of Puritan homes, and awakened tens of thousands of young hearts to the
+beauty and the nobleness of the old pre-Reformation age, and of that
+romance and art from which their too exclusive hereditary training had,
+until his time, shut them out.  And he has thus, truly, done a sacred
+deed in turning the hearts of the children to their fathers.  That was
+enough: but that is not the whole.  He has, conversely, turned the hearts
+of the fathers to the children.  The world-wide humanity of his poems,
+and, to be just, of all your American poets who have studied in his
+school, has produced throughout Great Britain a just reverence and
+affection for the American mind which will have--which has had
+already--large social and political results.  Be sure, be sure, that in
+spite of passing jars, our empire will never be long unjust to yours,
+while Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Lowell remain not merely the household
+bards--though that is much--but counsellors, comforters, and trusted
+friends to hundreds of thousands of gentle and earnest souls; from the
+palace to the parsonage, from the little village shop to the farm-house
+on the lonely down.
+
+But there is another American author--who was the delight of my own
+youth, and who should have been my teacher also, for he was a master of
+our common tongue, and his prose is as graceful and felicitous as poor
+Elia's own, and it is certainly more manly--another American author, I
+say, who, with that high-bred reverence for what is old, has told you
+already more about Westminster Abbey, and told it better, than I am
+likely to tell it.  Need I say that I mean the lamented Washington
+Irving?  Ah, that our authors had always been as just to you as he was
+just to us; and indeed more than just; for in his courtesy and geniality
+he saw us somewhat _en beau_, and treated old John Bull too much as the
+poet advises us to treat young and fair ladies--
+
+    Be to their faults a little blind,
+    Be to their virtues very kind.
+
+But what a charming book is that old 'Sketch-book.'  And what a charming
+essay that on our great Abbey, set with such gems of prose as these,--
+
+'The sun was pouring down a yellow autumnal ray into the square of the
+cloisters, beaming upon a scanty spot of grass in the centre, and
+lighting up an angle of the vaulted passage with a kind of dusty
+splendour.  From between the arcades, the eye glanced up to a bit of blue
+sky, or a passing cloud, and beheld the sun-gilt pinnacles of the Abbey
+towering into the azure heaven.'
+
+Or this again, describing the general effect of Henry the Seventh's
+unrivalled chapel,--'The very walls are wrought into universal ornament;
+encrusted with tracery, and scooped into niches, crowded with the statues
+of saints and martyrs.  Stone seems, by the cunning labour of the chisel,
+to have been robbed of its weight and density; suspended aloft as if by
+magic; and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful minuteness and
+airy security of a cobweb.'
+
+'Dusty splendour,' 'airy security,' epithets so unexpected, and yet so
+felicitous, as to be seemingly accidental.  Such are the tokens of that
+highest art, which is--to conceal its own existence.  After such speech
+as that, what have I to tell you of the great old Abbey?
+
+Yet there are one or two things, I dare to say, which Washington Irving
+would have written differently had he visited Westminster, not forty
+years ago, but now.
+
+I think, in the first place, that if he visited the great Abbey now, he
+would not have noticed that look of dilapidation at which he hints--and
+perhaps had a right to hint--some forty years ago.  Dilapidation, dirt,
+and negligence are as hateful to us now, as to the builder of the newest
+house outside.  We too, for more than a generation past, have felt, in
+common with the rest of England and with all the nations of Northern
+Europe, that awakened reverence for Mediaeval Art and Mediaeval History,
+which is--for good and for evil--the special social phenomenon of our
+times; the natural and, on the whole, useful countercheck to that extreme
+of revolutionary feeling which issues--as it did in Paris but three years
+ago--in utter hatred and renunciation of the past, and destruction of its
+monuments.
+
+To preserve, to restore, and, if not, to copy, as a sort of filial duty,
+the buildings which our forefathers have left us, is now held to be the
+very mark of cultivation and good taste in Britain.  It may be that we
+carry it too far; that by a servile and Chinese exactness of imitation we
+are crippling what originality of genius may exist among our draughtsmen,
+sculptors, architects.  But we at least confess thereby that we cannot
+invent and create as could our ancestors five hundred years ago; and as
+long as that is the case it is more wise in us--as in any people--to
+exhaust the signification and power of the past, and to learn all we can
+from older schools of art and thought ere we attempt novelties of our own
+which, I confess freely, usually issue in the ugly and the ludicrous.
+
+Be that as it may, we of Westminster Abbey have become, like other
+Englishmen, repairers and restorers.  Had we not so become, the nation
+would have demanded an account of us, as guardians of its national
+mausoleum, the building of which our illustrious Dean has so well said--
+
+'Of all the characteristics of Westminster Abbey, that which most endears
+it to the nation and gives most force to its name--which has, more than
+anything else, made it the home of the people of England and the most
+venerated fabric of the English Church--is not so much its glory as the
+seat of the coronations, or as the sepulchre of the kings; not so much
+its school, or its monastery, or its chapter, or its sanctuary, as the
+fact that it is the resting-place of famous Englishmen, from every rank
+and creed, and every form of genius.  It is not only Reims Cathedral and
+St. Denys both in one; but it is what the Pantheon was intended to be to
+France--what the Valhalla is to Germany--what Santa Croce is to Italy. . .
+It is this which inspired the saying of Nelson--Victory or Westminster
+Abbey.  It is this which has intertwined it with so many eloquent
+passages of Macaulay.  It is this which gives point to the allusions of
+recent Nonconformist statesmen, least inclined to draw illustrations from
+ecclesiastical buildings.  It is this which gives most promise of
+vitality to the whole institution.  Kings are no longer buried within its
+walls; even the splendour of pageants has ceased to attract.  But the
+desire to be buried in Westminster Abbey is as strong as ever.
+
+'This sprang, in the first instance, as a natural off-shoot from the
+coronations and interments of the kings.  Had they, like those of France,
+of Spain, of Austria, of Russia--been buried far away in some secluded
+spot, or had the English nation stood aloof from the English monarchy, it
+might have been otherwise.  The sepulchral chapels built by Henry the
+Third and Henry the Seventh might have stood alone in their glory.  No
+meaner dust need ever have mingled with the dust of Plantagenets, Tudors,
+Stuarts, and Guelphs. . . .  But it has been the peculiar privilege of
+the kings of England that neither in life nor in death have they been
+parted from their people.  As the Council of the Nation and the Courts of
+Law have pressed into the Palace of Westminster, and engirdled the very
+throne itself, so the ashes of the great citizens of England have pressed
+into the sepulchre of the kings, and surrounded them as with a guard of
+honour after their death.  We are sometimes inclined bitterly to contrast
+the placid dignity of our recumbent kings, with Chatham gesticulating
+from the northern transept, or Pitt from the western door, or Shakspeare
+leaning on his column in Poet's Corner, or Wolfe expiring by the chapel
+of St. John.  But, in fact, they are, in their different ways, keeping
+guard over the shrine of our monarchs and our laws; and their very
+incongruity and variety become symbols of that harmonious diversity in
+unity which pervades our whole commonwealth.'
+
+Honoured by such a trust, we who serve God daily in the great Abbey are
+not unmindful of the duty which lies on us to preserve and to restore, to
+the best of our power, the general fabric; and to call on government and
+on private persons to preserve and restore those monuments, for which
+they, not we, are responsible.  A stranger will not often enter our Abbey
+without finding somewhere or other among its vast arcades, skilled
+workmen busy over mosaic, marble, bronze, or 'storied window richly
+dight;' and the very cloisters, which to Washington Irving's eye were
+'discoloured with damp, crumbling with age, and crusted with a coat of
+hoary moss,' are being repaired till that 'rich tracery of the arches,
+and that leafy beauty of the roses which adorn the keystones'--of which
+he tells--shall be as sharp and bright as they were first, 500 years ago.
+
+One sentiment, again, which was called up in the mind of your charming
+essayist, at the sight of Westminster Abbey, I have not felt myself: I
+mean its sadness.  'What,' says he, 'is this vast assembly of sepulchres
+but a treasury of humiliation? a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the
+emptiness of renown and the certainty of oblivion.'
+
+So does that 'mournful magnificence' of which he speaks, seem to have
+weighed on him, that he takes for the motto of his whole essay, that
+grand Elizabethan epigram--
+
+    When I behold, with deep astonishment,
+    To famous Westminster how there resort
+    Living in brasse or stony monument,
+    The Princes and the worthies of all sort;
+    Do I not see re-formed nobilitie,
+    Without contempt, or pride, or ostentation,
+    And look upon offenseless majestie,
+    Naked of pomp or earthly domination?
+    And how a play-game of a painted stone
+    Contents the quiet, now, and silent sprites,
+    Whom all the world, which late they stood upon,
+    Could not content, nor quench their appetites.
+    Life is a frost of cold felicities;
+    And death the thaw of all our vanities.
+
+True, true--who knows it not, who has lived fifty years in such a world
+as this?--and yet but half the truth.
+
+Were there no after-life, no juster home beyond the grave, where each
+good deed--so spake the most august of lips--shall in no wise lose its
+reward--is it nought, _virum volitare per ora_, to live upon the lips of
+men, and find an immortality, even for a few centuries, in their hearts?
+I know what answer healthy souls have made in every age to that question;
+and what they will make to the end, as long as the respect of their
+fellow-creatures is, as our Creator meant that it should be, precious to
+virtuous men.  And let none talk of 'the play-game of a painted stone,'
+of 'the worthless honours of a bust.'  The worth of honour lies in that
+same worthlessness.  Fair money wage for fair work done, no wise man will
+despise.  But that is pay, not honour; the very preciousness
+whereof--like the old victor's parsley crown in the Greek games--is that
+it had no value, gave no pleasure, save that which is imperishable,
+spiritual, and not to be represented by gold nor quintessential diamond.
+
+Therefore, to me at least, the Abbey speaks, not of vanity and
+disappointment, but of content and peace.
+
+    The quiet now and silent sprites
+
+of whom old Christolero sings, they are content; and well for them that
+they should be.  They have received their nation's thanks, and ask no
+more, save to lie there in peace.  They have had justice done them; and
+more than one is there, who had scant justice done him while alive.  Even
+Castlereagh is there, in spite of Byron's and of Shelley's scorn.  It may
+be that they too have found out ere now, that there he ought to be.  The
+nation has been just to him who, in such wild times as the world had not
+seen for full three hundred years, did his duty according to his light,
+and died in doing it; and his sad noble face looks down on Englishmen as
+they go by, not with reproach, but rather with content.
+
+Content, I say, and peace.  Peace from their toil, and peace with their
+fellow-men.  They are at least at rest.  _Obdormierunt in pace_.  They
+have fallen asleep in peace.  The galled shoulder is freed from the
+collar at last.  The brave old horse has done his stage and lain down in
+the inn.  There are no more mistakes now, no more sores, no more falls;
+and no more whip, thank God, laid on too often when it was least needed
+and most felt.
+
+And there are no more quarrels, too.  Old personal feuds, old party
+bickerings, old differences of creed, and hatreds in the name of the God
+of love--all those are past, in that world of which the Abbey is to me a
+symbol and a sacrament.  Pitt and Fox, Warren Hastings and Macaulay, they
+can afford to be near to each other in the Abbey; for they understand
+each other now elsewhere; and the Romish Abbot's bones do not stir in
+their grave beside the bones of the Protestant Divine whom he, it may be,
+would have burned alive on earth.
+
+In the south aisle of Henry the VIIth's Chapel lies in royal pomp she who
+so long was Britain's bane--'the daughter of debate, who discord still
+did sow'--poor Mary Queen of Scots.  But English and Scots alike have
+forgotten the streams of noble blood she cost their nations; and look
+sadly and pityingly upon her effigy--why not?
+
+    Nothing is left of her
+    Now but pure womanly.
+
+And in the corresponding aisle upon the north, in a like tomb--which the
+voice of the English people demanded from the son of Mary Stuart--lies
+even a sadder figure still--poor Queen Elizabeth.  To her indeed, in her
+last days, Vanity of vanities--all was vanity.  Tyrone's rebellion killed
+her.  'This fruit have I of all my labours which I have taken under the
+sun'--and with a whole book of Ecclesiastes written on her mighty heart,
+the old crowned lioness of England coiled herself up in her lair, refused
+food, and died, and took her place henceforth opposite to her 'dear
+cousin' whom she really tried to save from herself--who would have slain
+her if she could, and whom she had at last, in obedience to the voice of
+the people of England, to slay against her will.  They have made up that
+quarrel now.
+
+Ay, and that tomb is the sacred symbol of a reconciliation even more
+pathetic and more strange.  Elizabeth lies--seemingly by her own
+desire--in the same vault as her own sister, Mary Tudor.  'Bloody Mary,'
+now, no more.  James the First, who had no love for either of them, has
+placed at the head of the monument 'two lines,' as has been well said,
+'full of a far deeper feeling than we should naturally have ascribed to
+him'--
+
+'Fellows in the kingdom, and in the tomb, Here we sleep; Mary and
+Elizabeth the sisters; in hope of the resurrection.'
+
+I make no comment on those words; or on that double sepulchre.  But did I
+not say well, that the great Abbey was a place of peace--a place to
+remind hardworked, purblind, and often, alas! embittered souls--
+
+    For Mother Earth she gathers all
+    Into her bosom, great and small.
+    Ah! could we look into her face,
+    We should not shrink from her embrace.
+
+Yes, all old misunderstandings are cleared up by now in that just world
+wherein all live to God.  They live to God; and therefore the great Abbey
+is to me awful indeed, but never sad.  Awful it ought to be, for it is a
+symbol of both worlds, the seen and the unseen; and of the veil, as thin
+as cobweb, yet opaque as night, which parts the two.  Awful it is; and
+ought to be--like that with which it grew--the life of a great nation,
+growing slowly to manhood, as all great nations grow, through ignorance
+and waywardness, often through sin and sorrow; hewing onward a devious
+track through unknown wildernesses; and struggling, victorious, though
+with bleeding feet, athwart the tangled woods and thorny brakes of stern
+experience.
+
+Awful it is; and should be.  And, therefore, I at least do not regret
+that its very form, outside, should want those heaven-pointing spires,
+that delicate lightness, that airy joyousness, of many a foreign
+cathedral--even of our own Salisbury and Lichfield.  You will see in its
+outer shape little, if any, of that type of architecture which was, as I
+believe, copied from scenery with which you, as Americans, must be even
+more familiar than were the mediaeval architects who travelled through
+the German forests and across the Alps to Rome.  True, we have our noble
+high-pitched snow-roof.  Our architect, like the rest, had seen the
+mountain ranges jut black and bare above the snows of winter.  He had
+seen those snows slip down in sheets, rush down in torrents from the sun,
+off the steep slabs of rock which coped the hill-side; and he, like the
+rest, has copied in that roof, for use as well as beauty, the mountain
+rocks.
+
+But he has not, as many another mediaeval architect has done, decked his
+roofs as Nature has decked hers, with the spruce and fir-tree spires,
+which cling to the hill-side of the crag, old above young, pinnacle above
+pinnacle, whorl above whorl; and clothed with them the sides and summit
+of the stone mountain which he had raised, till, like a group of firs
+upon an isolated rock, every point of the building should seem in act to
+grow toward heaven, and the grey leads of the Minster roof stand out amid
+peaks and turrets rich with carven foliage, as the grey rocks stand out
+of the primaeval woods.
+
+That part of the mediaeval builder's task was left unfinished, and indeed
+hardly attempted, by our Westminster architects, either under Henry III.,
+Edward I., or Henry V.
+
+Their Minster is grand enough by grave height and severe proportion; and
+he who enters stooping under that low-browed arch of the north door,
+beneath the beetling crag of weatherworn and crumbling stone, may feel
+like one who, in some old northern fairy tale, enters a cave in some lone
+mountain side where trolls and dragons guard the hoards of buried kings.
+
+And awful it is, and should be still, inside; under that vaulted roof a
+hundred feet above, all more mysterious and more huge, and yet more soft,
+beneath the murky London air.
+
+But sad I cannot call it.  Nor, I think, would you feel it sad, when you
+perceive how richly successive architects have squandered on it the
+treasures of their fancy; and made it, so they say, perhaps the most
+splendid specimen in the world of one of those stone forests, in which
+the men of old delighted to reproduce those leafy minsters which God, not
+man, has built; where they sent the columns aloft like the boles of giant
+trees, and wreathed their capitals, sometimes their very shafts, with
+vines and flowers; and decked with foliage and with fruit the bosses
+above and the corbels below; and sent up out of those corbels upright
+shafts along the walls, in likeness of the trees which sprang out of the
+rocks above their head; and raised those walls into great cliffs; and
+pierced those cliffs with the arches of the triforium, as with wild
+creatures' caves or hermits' cells; and represented in the horizontal
+string-courses and window-sills the strata of the rocks; and opened the
+windows into wide and lofty glades, broken, as in the forest, by the
+tracery of stems and boughs, through which were seen, not only the outer,
+but the upper world.  For they craved--as all true artists crave--for
+light and colour; and had the sky above been one perpetual blue, they
+might have been content with it, and left their glass transparent.  But
+in our dark dank northern clime, rain and snowstorm, black cloud and grey
+mist, were all that they were like to see outside for six months in the
+year.  So they took such light and colour as nature gave in her few gayer
+moods, and set aloft in their stained glass windows the hues of the
+noonday and of the sunset, and the purple of the heather, and the gold of
+the gorse, and the azure of the bugloss, and the crimson of the poppy;
+and among them, in gorgeous robes, the angels and the saints of heaven,
+and the memories of heroic virtues and heroic sufferings, that they might
+lift up the eyes and hearts of men for ever out of the dark sad world of
+the cold north, with all its coarsenesses and its crimes, towards a realm
+of perpetual holiness, amid a perpetual summer of beauty and of light: as
+one who, from between the black jaws of a narrow glen, or from beneath
+the black shade of gigantic trees, catches a glimpse of far lands gay
+with gardens and cottages; and purple mountain ranges; and the far-off
+sea; and the hazy horizon melting into the hazy sky; and finds his soul
+led forth into an infinite, at once of freedom and repose.
+
+Awful, and yet not sad; at least to one who is reminded by it, even in
+its darkest winter's gloom, of the primaeval tropic forest at its two
+most exquisite moments--its too brief twilight, and its too swift dawn.
+
+Awful, and yet not sad; at least to an Englishman, while right and left
+are ranged the statues, the busts, the names, the deeds, of men who have
+helped, each in his place, to make my country, and your country too, that
+which they are.
+
+For am I not in goodly company?  Am I not in very deed upon my best
+behaviour? among my betters? and at court?  Among men before whom I
+should have been ashamed to say or do a base or foolish thing?  Among men
+who have taught me, have ennobled me, though they lived centuries since?
+Men whom I should have loved had I met them on earth?  Men whom I may
+meet yet, and tell them how I love them, in some other world?  Men, too,
+whom I might have hated, and who might have hated me, had we met on this
+poor piecemeal earth; but whom I may learn to regard with justice and
+with charity in the world where all shall know, even as they are known?
+Men, too--alas! how fast their number grows--whom I have known, have
+loved, and lost too soon; and all gleaming out of the gloom, as every
+image of the dead should do, in pure white marble, as if purged from
+earthly taint?  To them, too--
+
+    Nothing is left of them
+    Now but pure manly.
+
+Yes, while their monuments remind me that they are not dead, but
+living--for all live to God--then awed I am, and humbled; better so: but
+sad I cannot be in such grand company.
+
+I said, the men who helped to make my country, and yours too.  It would
+be an impertinence in me to remind most of you of that.  You know as well
+as I that you are represented just as much as the English people, by
+every monument in that Abbey earlier than the Civil Wars, and by most
+monuments of later date, especially by those of all our literary men.
+You know that, and you value the old Abbey accordingly.  But a day may
+come--a generation may come, in a nation so rapidly increasing by foreign
+immigration, as well as by home-born citizenship--a generation may come
+who will forget that fact; and orators arise who will be glad that it
+should be forgotten--for awhile.  But if you would not that that evil day
+should come then teach your children--That the history and the freedom of
+America began neither with the War of Independence, nor with the sailing
+of the Pilgrim Fathers, nor with the settlement of Virginia; but 1500
+years and more before, in the days when our common Teutonic ancestors, as
+free then as this day, knew how
+
+    In den Deutschen Forsten
+    Wie der Aar zu horsten,
+
+when Herman smote the Romans in the Teutoburger-Wald, and the great
+Caesar wailed in vain to his slain general, 'Varus, give me back my
+legions!'  Teach your children that the Congress which sits at Washington
+is as much the child of Magna Charta as the Parliament which sits at
+Westminster; and that when you resisted the unjust demands of an English
+king and council, you did but that which the free commons of England held
+the right to do, and did, not only after, but before, the temporary
+tyranny of the Norman kings.
+
+Show them the tombs of English kings; not of those Norman kings--no
+Norman king lies buried in our Abbey--there is no royal interment between
+Edward the Confessor, the last English prince of Cerdic's house, and
+Henry the Third, the first of the new English line of kings.  Tell them,
+in justice to our common forefathers, that those men were no tyrants, but
+_kings_, who swore to keep, and for the most part did keep, like loyal
+gentlemen, the ancient English laws, which they had sworn in Westminster
+Abbey to maintain; and that the few of them who persisted in outraging
+the rights or the conscience of the free people of England, paid for
+their perjury with their crowns, or with their lives.  And tell them,
+too, in justice to our common ancestors, that there were never wanting to
+the kings, the nobles, or the commons of England, since the days when
+Simon de Montfort organised the House of Commons in Westminster Hall, on
+the 2nd of May, 1258--there were never wanting, I say, to the kings, the
+nobles, or the commons of England, counsellors who dared speak the truth
+and defend the right, even at the risk of their own goods and their own
+lives.
+
+Remind them, too--or let our monuments remind them--that even in the
+worst times of the War of Independence, there were not wanting, here in
+England, statesmen who dared to speak out for justice and humanity; and
+that they were not only confessed to be the leading men of their own day,
+but the very men whom England delighted to honour by places in her
+Pantheon.  Show them the monuments of Chatham, Pitt, and Fox--Burke
+sleeps in peace elsewhere--and remind them that the great earl, who
+literally died as much in your service as in ours, whose fiery invectives
+against the cruelties of that old war are, I am proud to say, still
+common-places for declamation among our English schoolboys, dared, even
+when all was at the worst, to tell the English House of Lords--'If I were
+an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in
+my country, I never would lay down my arms--never, never, never!'
+
+Yes--an American as well as an Englishman may find himself in the old
+Abbey in right good company.
+
+Yes--and I do not hesitate to say, that if you will look through the
+monuments erected in that Abbey, since those of Pitt and Fox--you will
+find that the great majority commemorate the children, not of
+obstruction, but of progress; not of darkness, but of light.
+
+Holland, Tierney, Mackintosh, Grattan, Peel, Canning, Palmerston, Isaac
+Watts, Bell, Wilberforce, Sharp, the Macaulays, Fowell Buxton, Francis
+Horner, Charles Buller, Cobden, Watt, Rennell, Telford, Locke, Brunel,
+Grote, Thackeray, Dickens, Maurice--men who, each in his own way, toiled
+for freedom of some kind; freedom of race, of laws, of commerce, of
+locomotion, of production, of speech, of thought, of education, of human
+charity, and of sympathy--these are the men whom England still delights
+to honour; whose busts around our walls show that the ancient spirit is
+not dead, and that we, as you, are still, as 1500 years ago, the sons of
+freedom and of light.
+
+But, beside these statesmen who were just and true to you, and therefore
+to their native land, there lie men before whose monuments I would ask
+thoughtful Americans to pause--I mean those of our old fighters, by land
+and sea.  I do not speak merely of those who lived before our Civil Wars,
+though they are indeed our common heritage.  And when you look at the
+noble monuments of De Vere and Norris, the fathers of the English
+infantry, you should remember that your ancestors and mine, or that of
+any other Englishman, may have trailed pike and handled sword side by
+side under those very men, in those old wars of the Netherlands, which
+your own great historian, Mr. Motley, has so well described; or have
+sailed together to Cadiz fight, and to the Spanish Main, with Raleigh or
+with Drake.
+
+There are those, again, who did their duty two and three generations
+later--though one of the noblest of them all, old Admiral Blake, alas!
+lies we know not where--cast out, with Cromwell and his heroes, by the
+fanatics and sycophants of the Restoration--whom not only we, but Royalty
+itself, would now restore, could we recover their noble ashes, to their
+rightful resting-place.
+
+And these, if not always our common ancestors, were, often enough, our
+common cousins, as in the case of my own family, in which one brother was
+settling in New England, to found there a whole new family of Kingsleys
+while the other brother was fighting in the Parliamentary army, and
+helping to defeat Charles at Rowton Moor.
+
+But there is another class of warriors' tombs, which I ask you, if ever
+you visit the Abbey, to look on with respect, and let me say, affection
+too.  I mean the men who did their duty, by land and sea, in that long
+series of wars which, commencing in 1739, ended in 1783, with our
+recognition of your right and power to be a free and independent people.
+Of those who fought against you I say nought.  But I must speak of those
+who fought for you--who brought to naught, by sheer hard blows, that
+family compact of the House of Bourbon, which would have been as
+dangerous to you upon this side of the ocean as to us upon the other; who
+smote with a continual stroke the trans-Atlantic power of Spain, till
+they placed her once vast and rich possessions at your mercy to this day;
+and who--even more important still--prevented the French from seizing at
+last the whole valley of the Mississippi, and girdling your nascent
+dominion with a hostile frontier, from Louisiana round to the mouth of
+the St. Lawrence.
+
+When you see Wolfe's huge cenotaph, with its curious bronze bas-relief of
+the taking of the heights of Abraham, think, I pray you, that not only
+for England, but for you, the 'little red-haired corporal' conquered and
+died.
+
+Remember, too, that while your ancestors were fighting well by land, and
+Washington and such as he were learning their lesson at Fort Duquesne and
+elsewhere better than we could teach them, we were fighting well where we
+knew how to fight--at sea.  And when, near to Wolfe's monument, or in the
+Nave, you see such names as Cornwallis, Saumarez, Wager, Vernon--the
+conqueror of Portobello--Lord Aubrey Beauclerk, and so forth--bethink you
+that every French or Spanish ship which these men took, and every convoy
+they cut off, from Toulon to Carthagena, and from Carthagena to Halifax,
+made more and more possible the safe severance from England of the very
+Colonies which you were then helping us to defend.  And then agree, like
+the generous-hearted people which you are, that if, in after years, we
+sinned against you--and how heavy were our sins, I know too well--there
+was a time, before those evil days, when we fought for you, and by your
+side, as the old lion by the young; even though, like the old lion and
+the young, we began, only too soon, tearing each other to pieces over the
+division of the prey.
+
+Nay, I will go further, and say this, paradoxical as it may seem:--When
+you enter the North Transept from St. Margaret's Churchyard you see on
+your right hand a huge but not ungraceful naval monument of white marble,
+inscribed with the names of Bayne, Blair, Lord Robert Manners--three
+commanders of Rodney's, in the crowning victory of April 12, 1782--fought
+upon Tropic waters, over which I have sailed, flushed with the thought
+that my own grandfather was that day on board of Rodney's ship.
+
+Now do you all know what that day's great fight meant for you,--fought
+though it was, while you, alas! were still at war with us?  It meant
+this.  That that day--followed up, six months after, by Lord Howe's
+relief of Gibraltar--settled, I hold, the fate of the New World for many
+a year.  True, in one sense, it was settled already.  Cornwallis had
+already capitulated at York Town.  But even then the old lion, disgraced,
+bleeding, fainting, ready to yield--but only to you, of his own kin and
+blood--struck, though with failing paw, two such tremendous blows at his
+old enemies, as deprived them thenceforth of any real power in the New
+World; precipitated that bankruptcy and ruin which issued in the French
+and Spanish revolutions; and made certain, as I believe, the coming day
+when the Anglo-Saxon race shall be the real masters of the whole New
+World.
+
+Of poets and of men of letters I say nought.  They are the heritage,
+neither of us, nor you, but of the human race.  The mere man of letters
+may well sleep in the very centre of that busy civilisation from which he
+drew his inspiration: but not the poet--not, at least, the poet of these
+days.  He goes not to the town, but nature, for his inspirations, and to
+nature when he dies he should return.  Such men--artificial, and
+town-bred--however brilliant, or even grand at times--as Davenant,
+Dryden, Cowley, Congreve, Prior, Gay--sleep fitly in our care here.  Yet
+even Pope--though one of such in style and heart--preferred the parish
+church of the then rural Twickenham, and Gray the lonely graveyard of
+Stoke Pogis.  Ben Jonson has a right to lie with us.  He was a townsman
+to the very heart, and a court-poet too.  But Chaucer, Spenser,
+Drayton--such are, to my mind, out of place.  Chaucer lies here, because
+he lived hard by.  Spenser through bitter need and woe.  But I should
+have rather buried Chaucer in some trim garden, Spenser beneath the
+forest aisles, and Drayton by some silver stream--each man's dust resting
+where his heart was set.  Happier, it seems to me, are those who like
+Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Southey, Scott and Burns, lie far away, in
+scenes they knew and loved; fulfilling Burke's wise choice: 'After all I
+had sooner sleep in the southern corner of a country churchyard than in
+the tomb of all the Capulets.'
+
+Yes--these worthies, one and all, are a token that the Great Abbey, and
+all its memories of 800 years, does not belong to us alone, nor even to
+the British Empire alone and all its Colonies, but to America likewise!
+That when an American enters beneath that mighty shade, he treads on
+common and ancestral ground, as sacred to him as it is to us; the symbol
+of common descent, common development, common speech, common creed,
+common laws, common literature, common national interests, and I trust,
+of a common respect and affection, such as the wise can only feel toward
+the wise, and the strong toward the strong.
+
+Is all this sentiment?  Remember what I said just now: by well-used
+sentiment, and well-used sorrow, great nations live.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE II.
+THE STAGE AS IT WAS ONCE.
+
+
+What the Stage is now, I presume, all know.  I am not myself a playgoer,
+but I am informed that, in Europe at least, it is not in a state to
+arouse any deep interest or respect in any cultivated or virtuous person.
+Meanwhile, keeping fast to my intention of talking to you only about
+things worthy of your interest and respect, because they are good, true,
+and beautiful, I wish to tell you what the Stage was once, in a republic
+of the past--what it may be again, I sometimes dream, in some republic of
+the future.
+
+Let me take you back in fancy some 2314 years--440 years before the
+Christian era, and try to sketch for you--alas! how clumsily--a great,
+though tiny people, in one of their greatest moments--in one of the
+greatest moments, it may be, of the human race.  For surely it is a great
+and a rare moment for humanity, when all that is loftiest in it--when
+reverence for the Unseen powers, reverence for the heroic dead, reverence
+for the father-land; and that reverence, too, for self, which is
+expressed in stateliness and self-restraint, in grace and courtesy; when
+all these, I say, can lend themselves, even for a day, to the richest
+enjoyment of life--to the enjoyment of beauty in form and sound, and of
+relaxation, not brutalizing, but ennobling.
+
+Rare, alas! have such seasons been in the history of poor humanity.  But
+when they have come, they have lifted it up one stage higher thenceforth.
+Men, having been such once, may become such again; and the work which
+such times have left behind them becomes immortal.
+
+    A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
+
+Let me take you to the then still unfinished theatre of Athens, hewn out
+of the limestone rock on the south-east slope of the Acropolis.
+
+Above are the new marble buildings of the Parthenon, rich with the
+statues and bas-reliefs of Phidias and his scholars, gleaming white
+against the blue sky, with the huge bronze statue of Athene Promachos,
+fifty feet in height, towering up among the temples and colonnades.  In
+front, and far below, gleams the blue sea, and Salamis beyond.
+
+And there are gathered the people of Athens--50,000 of them, possibly,
+when the theatre was complete and full.  If it be fine, they all wear
+garlands on their heads.  If the sun be too hot, they wear wide-brimmed
+straw hats.  And if a storm comes on, they will take refuge in the
+porticos beneath; not without wine and cakes, for what they have come to
+see will last for many an hour, and they intend to feast their eyes and
+ears from sunrise to sunset.  On the highest seats are slaves and
+freedmen, below them the free citizens; and on the lowest seats of all
+are the dignitaries of the republic--the priests, the magistrates, and
+the other [Greek text]--the fair and good men--as the citizens of the
+highest rank were called, and with them foreign ambassadors and
+distinguished strangers.  What an audience--the rapidest, subtlest,
+wittiest, down to the very cobblers and tinkers, the world has ever seen.
+And what noble figures on those front seats; Pericles, with Aspasia
+beside him, and all his friends--Anaxagoras the sage, Phidias the
+sculptor, and many another immortal artist; and somewhere among the free
+citizens, perhaps beside his father Sophroniscus the sculptor, a short,
+square, pugnosed boy of ten years old, looking at it all with strange
+eyes--'who will be one day,' so said the Pythoness at Delphi, 'the wisest
+man in Greece'--sage, metaphysician, humourist, warrior, patriot,
+martyr--for his name is _Socrates_.
+
+All are in their dresses of office; for this is not merely a day of
+amusement, but of religious ceremony; sacred to Dionysos--Bacchus, the
+inspiring god, who raises men above themselves, for good--or for evil.
+
+The evil, or at least the mere animal aspect of that inspiration, was to
+be seen in forms grotesque and sensuous enough in those very festivals,
+when the gayer and coarser part of the population, in town and country,
+broke out into frantic masquerade, of which that silly carnival of Rome
+is perhaps the last paltry and unmeaning relic.  'When,' as the learned
+O. Muller says, 'the desire of escaping from self into something new and
+strange, of living in an imaginary world, broke forth in a thousand ways;
+not merely in revelry and solemn, though fantastic songs, but in a
+hundred disguises, imitating the subordinate beings--satyrs, pans, and
+nymphs, by whom the god was surrounded, and through whom life seemed to
+pass from him into vegetation, and branch off into a variety of beautiful
+or grotesque forms--beings who were ever present to the fancy of the
+Greeks, as a convenient step by which they could approach more nearly to
+the presence of the Divinity.'  But even out of that seemingly bare
+chaos, Athenian genius was learning how to construct, under Eupolis,
+Cratinus and Aristophanes, that elder school of comedy, which remains not
+only unsurpassed, but unapproachable, save by Rabelais alone, as the
+ideal cloudland of masquerading wisdom, in which the whole universe goes
+mad--but with a subtle method in its madness.
+
+Yes, so it has been, under some form or other, in every race and
+clime--ever since Eve ate of the magic fruit, that she might be as a god,
+knowing good and evil, and found, poor thing, as most have since, that it
+was far easier and more pleasant to know the evil than to know the good.
+But that theatre was built that men might know therein the good as well
+as the evil.  To learn the evil, indeed, according to their light, and
+the sure vengeance of Ate and the Furies which tracks up the evil-doer.
+But to learn also the good--lessons of piety, patriotism, heroism,
+justice, mercy, self-sacrifice, and all that comes out of the hearts of
+men and women not dragged _below_, but raised _above_ themselves; and
+behind all--at least in the nobler and earlier tragedies of AEschylus and
+Sophocles, before Euripides had introduced the tragedy of mere human
+passion; that sensation tragedy, which is the only one the world knows
+now, and of which the world is growing rapidly tired--behind all, I say,
+lessons of the awful and unfathomable mystery of human existence, of
+unseen destiny; of that seemingly capricious distribution of weal and
+woe, to which we can find no solution on this side the grave, for which
+the old Greek could find no solution whatsoever.
+
+Therefore there was a central object in the old Greek theatre, most
+important to it, but which does not exist in our theatres, and did not in
+the old Roman; because our tragedies, like the Roman, are mere plays
+concerning love, murder, and so forth, while the Greek were concerning
+the deepest relations of man to the Unseen.
+
+The almost circular orchestra, or pit, between the benches and the stage,
+was empty of what we call spectators--because it was destined for the
+true and ideal spectators--the representatives of humanity; in its centre
+was a round platform, the [Greek text]--originally the altar of
+Bacchus--from which the leader of these representatives, the leader of
+the Chorus, could converse with the actors on the stage and take his part
+in the drama; and round this thymele the Chorus ranged, with measured
+dance and song, chanting, to the sound of a simple flute, odes such as
+the world had never heard before or since, save perhaps in the
+temple-worship at Jerusalem.  A chorus now, as you know, means merely any
+number of persons singing in full harmony on any subject.  The Chorus was
+then in tragedy, and indeed in the higher comedy, what Schlegel well
+calls 'the ideal spectator,'--a personified reflection on the action
+going on, the incorporation into the representation itself of the
+sentiments of the poet, as the spokesman of the whole human race.  He
+goes on to say (and I think truly), 'that the Chorus always retained
+among the Greeks a peculiar national signification, publicity being,
+according to their republican notions, essential to the completeness of
+every important transaction.'  Thus the Chorus represented idealised
+public opinion: not of course, the shifting, hasty public opinion of the
+moment--to that it was a conservative check, and it calmed to soberness
+and charity--for it was the matured public opinion of centuries; the
+experience, and usually the sad experience, of many generations; the very
+spirit of the Greek race.
+
+The Chorus might be composed of what the poet would.  Of ancient
+citizens, waiting for their sons to come back from the war, as in the
+_Agamemnon_ of AEschylus; of sea-nymphs, as in his _Prometheus Bound_;
+even of the very Furies who hunt the matricide, as in his _Eumenides_; of
+Senators as in the _Antigone_ of Sophocles; or of village farmers as in
+his _OEdipus at Colonos_--and now I have named five of the greatest
+poems, as I hold, written by mortal man till Dante rose.  Or it may be
+the Chorus was composed--as in the comedies of Aristophanes, the greatest
+humourist the world has ever seen--of birds, or of frogs, or even of
+clouds.  It may rise to the level of Don Quixote, or sink to that of
+Sancho Panza; for it is always the incarnation of such wisdom, heavenly
+or earthly, as the poet wishes the people to bring to bear on the
+subject-matter!
+
+But let the poets themselves, rather than me, speak awhile.  Allow me to
+give you a few specimens of these choruses--the first as an example of
+that practical, and yet surely not un-divine wisdom, by which they
+supplied the place of our modern preacher, or essayist, or didactic poet.
+
+Listen to this of the old men's chorus in the _Agamemnon_, in the
+spirited translation of my friend Professor Blackie:--
+
+       'Twas said of old, and 'tis said to-day,
+       That wealth to prosperous stature grown
+          Begets a birth of its own:
+       That a surfeit of evil by good is prepared,
+       And sons must bear what allotment of woe
+          Their sires were spared.
+       But this I refuse to believe: I know
+          That impious deeds conspire
+       To beget an offspring of impious deeds
+          Too like their ugly sire.
+    But whoso is just, though his wealth like a river
+    Flow down, shall be scathless: his house shall rejoice
+       In an offspring of beauty for ever.
+
+       The heart of the haughty delights to beget
+       A haughty heart.  From time to time
+       In children's children recurrent appears
+          The ancestral crime.
+    When the dark hour comes that the gods have decreed
+    And the Fury burns with wrathful fires,
+       A demon unholy, with ire unabated,
+       Lies like black night on the halls of the fated;
+       And the recreant Son plunges guiltily on
+          To perfect the guilt of his Sires.
+
+    But Justice shines in a lowly cell;
+    In the homes of poverty, smoke-begrimed,
+    With the sober-minded she loves to dwell.
+       But she turns aside
+    From the rich man's house with averted eye,
+    The golden-fretted halls of pride
+    Where hands with lucre are foul, and the praise
+    Of counterfeit goodness smoothly sways;
+    And wisely she guides in the strong man's despite
+       All things to an issue of RIGHT.
+
+Let me now give you another passage from the _Eumenides_--or _Furies_, of
+AEschylus.
+
+Orestes, prince of Argos, you must remember, has avenged on his mother
+Clytemnestra the murder of his father, king Agamemnon, on his return from
+Troy.  Pursued by the Furies, he takes refuge in the temple of Apollo at
+Delphi, and then, still Fury-haunted, goes to Athens, where Pallas Athene
+the warrior-maiden, the tutelary goddess of Athens, bids him refer his
+cause to the Areopagus, the highest court of Athens, Apollo acting as his
+advocate, and she sitting as umpire in the midst.  The white and black
+balls are thrown into the urn, and are equal; and Orestes is only
+delivered by the decision of Athene--as the representative of the nearer
+race of gods, the Olympians, the friends of man, in whose likeness man is
+made.  The Furies are the representatives of the older and darker
+creed--which yet has a depth of truth in it--of the irreversible dooms
+which underlie all nature; and which represent the _Law_, and not the
+Gospel, the consequence of the mere act, independent of the spirit which
+has prompted it.
+
+They break out in fury against the overbearing arrogance of these younger
+gods.  Athene bears their rage with equanimity, addresses them in the
+language of kindness, even of veneration, till these so indomitable
+beings are unable to withstand the charm of her mild eloquence.  They are
+to have a sanctuary in the Athenian land, and to be called no more Furies
+(Erinnys), but Eumenides--the _well-conditioned_--the kindly goddesses.
+And all ends with a solemn procession round the orchestra, with hymns of
+blessing, while the terrible Chorus of the Furies, clothed in black, with
+blood-stained girdles, and serpents in their hair, in masks having
+perhaps somewhat of the terrific beauty of Medusa-masks, are convoyed to
+their new sanctuary by a procession of children, women, and old men in
+purple robes and torches in their hands, after Athene and the Furies have
+sung, in response to each other, a chorus from which I must beg leave to
+give you an extract or two.
+
+                   _Eldest Fury_ (_Leader of the Chorus_).
+
+    Far from thy dwelling, and far from thy border,
+    By the grace of my godhead benignant I order
+    The blight which may blacken the bloom of the trees.
+    Far from thy border, and far from thy dwelling,
+    Be the hot blast which shrivels the bud in its swelling,
+    The seed-rotting taint, and the creeping disease.
+    Thy flocks be still doubled, thy seasons be steady,
+    And when Hermes is near thee, thy hand be still ready
+       The Heaven-dropt bounty to seize.
+
+                                  _Athene_.
+
+    Hear her words, my city's warders--
+    Fraught with blessings, she prevaileth
+    With Olympians and Infernals,
+    Dread Erinnys much revered.
+    Mortal faith she guideth plainly
+    To what goal she pleaseth, sending
+    Songs to some, to others days
+    With tearful sorrows dulled.
+
+                                  _Furies_.
+
+       Far from thy border
+       The lawless disorder
+    That sateless of evil shall reign;
+       Far from thy dwelling,
+       The dear blood welling,
+    That taints thine own hearth with the slain.
+       When slaughter from slaughter
+       Shall flow like the water,
+    And rancour from rancour shall grow.
+       But joy with joy blending,
+       Live, each to all lending;
+    And hating one-hearted the foe.
+       When bliss hath departed;
+       From love single-hearted,
+    A fountain of healing shall flow.
+
+                                  _Athene_.
+
+    Wisely now the tongue of kindness
+    Thou hast found, the way of love.
+    And these terror-speaking faces
+    Now look wealth to me and mine.
+    Her so willing, ye more willing,
+    Now receive.  This land and city,
+    On ancient right securely throned,
+    Shall shine for evermore.
+
+                                  _Furies_.
+
+    Hail, and all hail, mighty people, be greeted,
+    On the sons of Athena shines sunshine the clearest.
+    Blest people, near Jove the Olympian seated.
+    And dear to the maiden his daughter the dearest.
+    Timely wise 'neath the wings of the daughter ye gather,
+    And mildly looks down on her children the Father.
+
+Those of you here who love your country as well as the old Athenians
+loved theirs, will feel at once the grand political significance of such
+a scene, in which patriotism and religion become one--and feel, too, the
+exquisite dramatic effect of the innocent, the weak, the unwarlike,
+welcoming among them, without fear, because without guilt, those ancient
+snaky-haired sisters, emblems of all that is most terrible and most
+inscrutable, in the destiny of nations, of families, and of men:
+
+    To their hallowed habitations
+    'Neath Ogygian earth's foundations
+    In that darksome hall
+    Sacrifice and supplication
+    Shall not fail.  In adoration
+    Silent worship all.
+
+Listen again, to the gentler patriotism of a gentler poet, Sophocles
+himself.  The village of Colonos, a mile from Athens, was his birthplace;
+and in his _OEdipus Coloneus_, he makes his Chorus of village officials
+sing thus of their consecrated olive grove:
+
+       In good hap, stranger, to these rural seats
+       Thou comest, to this region's blest retreats,
+       Where white Colonos lifts his head,
+       And glories in the bounding steed.
+    Where sadly sweet the frequent nightingale
+       Impassioned pours his evening song,
+    And charms with varied notes each verdant vale,
+       The ivy's dark-green boughs among,
+       Or sheltered 'neath the clustering vine
+       Which, high above him form a bower,
+       Safe from the sun or stormy shower,
+       Where frolic Bacchus often roves,
+    And visits with his fostering nymphs the groves.
+
+       Bathed in the dew of heaven each morn,
+       Fresh is the fair Narcissus born,
+       Of those great gods the crown of old;
+       The crocus glitters, robed in gold.
+    Here restless fountains ever murmuring glide,
+       And as their crisped streamlets play,
+    To feed, Cephisus, thine unfailing tide,
+       Fresh verdure marks their winding way.
+       Here oft to raise the tuneful song
+       The virgin band of Muses deigns,
+    And car-borne Aphrodite guides her golden reins.
+
+Then they go on, this band of village elders, to praise the gods for
+their special gifts to that small Athenian land.  They praise Pallas
+Athene, who gave their forefathers the olive; then Poseidon--Neptune, as
+the Romans call him--who gave their forefathers the horse; and something
+more--the ship,--the horse of the sea, as they, like the old Norse
+Vikings after them, delighted to call it.--
+
+    Our highest vaunt is this--Thy grace,
+       Poseidon, we behold.
+    The ruling curb, embossed with gold,
+    Controls the courser's managed pace.
+    Though loud, oh king, thy billows roar,
+    Our strong hands grasp the labouring oar,
+    And while the Nereids round it play,
+    Light cuts our bounding bark its way.
+
+What a combination of fine humanities!  Dance and song, patriotism and
+religion, so often parted among us, have flowed together into one in
+these stately villagers; each a small farmer; each a trained soldier, and
+probably a trained seaman also; each a self-governed citizen; and each a
+cultured gentleman, if ever there were gentlemen on earth.
+
+But what drama, doing, or action--for such is the meaning of the word--is
+going on upon the stage, to be commented on by the sympathizing Chorus?
+
+One drama, at least, was acted in Athens in that year--440 B.C.--which
+you, I doubt not, know well--that _Antigone_ of Sophocles, which
+Mendelssohn has resuscitated, in our own generation, by setting it to
+music, divine indeed, though very different from the music to which it
+was set, probably by Sophocles himself, at its first, and for ought we
+know, its only representation.  For pieces had not then, as now, a run of
+a hundred nights and more.  The Athenian genius was so fertile, and the
+Athenian audience so eager for novelty, that new pieces were demanded,
+and were forthcoming, for each of the great festivals, and if a piece was
+represented a second time it was usually after an interval of some years.
+They did not, moreover, like the moderns, run every night to some theatre
+or other, as a part of the day's amusement.  Tragedy, and even comedy,
+were serious subjects, calling out, not a passing sigh, or passing laugh,
+but all the higher faculties and emotions.  And as serious subjects were
+to be expressed in verse and music, which gave stateliness, doubtless,
+even to the richest burlesques of Aristophanes, and lifted them out of
+mere street-buffoonery into an ideal fairy land of the grotesque, how
+much more stateliness must verse and music have added to their tragedy!
+And how much have we lost, toward a true appreciation of their dramatic
+art, by losing almost utterly not only the laws of their melody and
+harmony, but even the true metric time of their odes! music and metre,
+which must have surely been as noble as their poetry, their sculpture,
+their architecture, possessed by the same exquisite sense of form and of
+proportion.  One thing we can understand--how this musical form of the
+drama, which still remains to us in lower shapes, in the oratorio, in the
+opera, must have helped to raise their tragedies into that ideal sphere
+in which they all, like the _Antigone_, live and move.  So ideal and yet
+so human; nay rather, truly ideal, because truly human.  The gods, the
+heroes, the kings, the princesses of Greek tragedy were dear to the
+hearts of Greek republicans, not merely as the founders of their states,
+not merely as the tutelary deities, many of them, of their country: but
+as men and women like themselves, only more vast; with mightier wills,
+mightier virtues, mightier sorrows, and often mightier crimes; their
+inward free-will battling, as Schlegel has well seen, against outward
+circumstance and overruling fate, as every man should battle, unless he
+sink to be a brute.  'In tragedy,' says Schlegel--uttering thus a deep
+and momentous truth--'the gods themselves either come forward as the
+servants of destiny and mediate executors of its decrees, or approve
+themselves godlike only by asserting their liberty of action and entering
+upon the same struggles with fate which man himself has to encounter.'
+And I believe this, that this Greek tragedy, with its godlike men and
+manlike gods, and heroes who had become gods by the very vastness of
+their humanity, was a preparation, and it may be a necessary preparation,
+for the true Christian faith in a Son of man, who is at once utterly
+human and utterly divine.  Man is made in the likeness of God--is the
+root-idea, only half-conscious, only half-expressed, but instinctive,
+without which neither the Greek Tragedies, nor the Homeric Poems, six
+hundred years before them, could have been composed.  Doubtless the idea
+that man was like a god degenerated too often into the idea that the gods
+were like men, and as wicked.  But that travestie of a great truth is not
+confined to those old Greeks.  Some so-called Christian theories--as I
+hold--have sinned in that direction as deeply as the Athenians of old.
+
+Meanwhile, I say, that this long acquiescence in the conception of
+godlike struggle, godlike daring, godlike suffering, godlike martyrdom;
+the very conception which was so foreign to the mythologies of any other
+race--save that of the Jews, and perhaps of our own Teutonic
+forefathers--did prepare, must have prepared, men to receive as most
+rational and probable, as the satisfaction of their highest instincts,
+the idea of a Being in whom all those partial rays culminated in clear,
+pure light; of a Being at once utterly human and utterly divine; who by
+struggle, suffering, self-sacrifice, without a parallel, achieved a
+victory over circumstance and all the dark powers which beleaguer man
+without a parallel likewise.
+
+Take, as an example, the figure which you know best--the figure of
+Antigone herself--devoting herself to be entombed alone, for the sake of
+love and duty.  Love of a brother, which she can only prove, alas! by
+burying his corpse.  Duty to the dead, an instinct depending on no
+written law, but springing out of the very depths of those blind and yet
+sacred monitions which prove that the true man is not an animal, but a
+spirit; fulfilling her holy purpose, unchecked by fear, unswayed by her
+sisters' entreaties.  Hardening her heart magnificently till her fate is
+sealed; and then after proving her godlike courage, proving the
+tenderness of her womanhood by that melodious wail over her own untimely
+death and the loss of marriage joys, which some of you must know from the
+music of Mendelssohn, and which the late Dean Milman has put into English
+thus--
+
+    Come, fellow-citizens, and see
+    The desolate Antigone.
+    On the last path her steps shall tread,
+    Set forth, the journey of the dead,
+    Watching, with vainly lingering gaze,
+    Her last, last sun's expiring rays,
+
+    Never to see it, never more,
+    For down to Acheron's dread shore,
+    A living victim am I led
+    To Hades' universal bed.
+    To my dark lot no bridal joys
+    Belong, nor e'er the jocund noise
+    Of hymeneal chant shall sound for me,
+    But death, cold death, my only spouse shall be.
+
+    Oh tomb!  Oh bridal chamber!  Oh deep-delved
+    And strongly-guarded mansion!  I descend
+    To meet in your dread chambers all my kindred,
+    Who in dark multitudes have crowded down
+    Where Proserpine received the dead.  But I,
+    The last, and oh how few more miserable,
+    Go down, or ere my sands of life are run.
+
+And let me ask you whether the contemplation of such a self-sacrifice
+should draw you, should have drawn those who heard the tale nearer to, or
+further from, a certain cross which stood on Calvary some 1800 years ago?
+May not the tale of Antigone heard from mother or from nurse have nerved
+ere now some martyr-maiden to dare and suffer in an even holier cause?
+
+But to return.  This set purpose of the Athenian dramatists of the best
+school to set before men a magnified humanity, explains much in their
+dramas which seem to us at first not only strange but faulty.  The masks
+which gave one grand but unvarying type of countenance to each well-known
+historic personage, and thus excluded the play of feature, animated
+gesture, and almost all which we now consider as 'acting' proper; the
+thicksoled cothurni which gave the actor a more than human stature; the
+poverty (according to our notions) of the scenery, which usually
+represented merely the front of a palace or other public place, and was
+often though not always unchanged during the whole performance; the total
+absence in fact, of anything like that scenic illusion which most
+managers of theatres seem now to consider as their highest achievement;
+the small number of the actors, two, or at most three only, being present
+on the stage at once,--the simplicity of the action, in which intrigue
+(in the play-house sense) and any complication of plot are utterly
+absent; all this must have concentrated not the eye of the spectator on
+the scene, but his ear upon the voice, and his emotions on the personages
+who stood out before him without a background, sharp-cut and clear as a
+group of statuary which is the same, place it where you will, complete in
+itself--a world of beauty, independent of all other things and beings
+save on the ground on which it needs must stand.  It was the personage
+rather than his surroundings, which was to be impressed by every word on
+the spectator's heart and intellect; and the very essence of Greek
+tragedy is expressed in the still famous words of Medea--
+
+    Che resta?  Io.
+
+Contrast this with the European drama--especially with the highest form
+of it--our own Elizabethan.  It resembles, as has been often said in
+better words than mine, not statuary but painting.  These dramas affect
+colour, light, and shadow, background whether of town or country,
+description of scenery where scenic machinery is inadequate, all in fact,
+which can blend the action and the actors with the surrounding
+circumstances, without letting them altogether melt into the
+circumstances; which can show them a part of the great whole, by harmony
+or discord with the whole universe, down to the flowers beneath their
+feet.  This, too, had to be done: how it became possible for even the
+genius of a Shakespeare to get it done, I may with your leave hint to you
+hereafter.  Why it was not given to the Greeks to do it, I know not.
+
+Let us at least thank them for what they did.  One work was given them,
+and that one they fulfilled as it had never been fulfilled before; as it
+will never need to be fulfilled again; for the Greeks' work was done not
+for themselves alone but for all races in all times; and Greek Art is the
+heirloom of the whole human race; and that work was to assert in drama,
+lyric, sculpture, music, gymnastic, the dignity of man--the dignity of
+man which they perceived for the most part with their intense aesthetic
+sense, through the beautiful in man.  Man with them was divine, inasmuch
+as he could perceive beauty and be beautiful himself.  Beauty might be
+physical, aesthetic, intellectual, moral.  But in proportion as a thing
+was perfect it revealed its own perfection by its beauty.  Goodness
+itself was a form--though the highest form--of beauty.  [Greek text]
+meant both the physically beautiful and the morally good; [Greek text]
+both the ugly and the bad.
+
+Out of this root-idea sprang the whole of that Greek sculpture, which is
+still, and perhaps ever will be, one of the unrivalled wonders of the
+world.
+
+Their first statues, remember, were statues of the gods.  This is an
+historic fact.  Before B.C. 580 there were probably no statues in Greece
+save those of deities.  But of what form?  We all know that the usual
+tendency of man has been to represent his gods as more or less monstrous.
+Their monstrosity may have been meant, as it was certainly with the
+Mexican idols, and probably those of the Semitic races of Syria and
+Palestine, to symbolise the ferocious passions which they attributed to
+those objects of their dread, appeasable alone by human sacrifice.  Or
+the monstrosity, as with the hawk-headed or cat-headed Egyptian idols,
+the winged bulls of Nineveh and Babylon, the many-handed deities of
+Hindostan--merely symbolised powers which could not, so the priest and
+the sculptor held, belong to mere humanity.  Now, of such monstrous forms
+of idols, the records in Greece are very few and very ancient--relics of
+an older worship, and most probably of an older race.  From the earliest
+historic period, the Greek was discerning more and more that the divine
+could be best represented by the human; the tendency of his statuary was
+more and more to honour that divine, by embodying it in the highest human
+beauty.
+
+In lonely mountain shrines there still might linger, feared and honoured,
+dolls like those black virgins, of unknown antiquity, which still work
+wonders on the European continent.  In the mysterious cavern of Phigalia,
+for instance, on the Eleatic shore of Peloponnese, there may have been in
+remote times--so the legend ran--an old black wooden image, a woman with
+a horse's head and mane, and serpents growing round her head, who held a
+dolphin in one hand and a dove in the other.  And this image may have
+been connected with old nature-myths about the marriage of Demeter and
+Poseidon--that is, of encroachments of the sea upon the land; and the
+other myths of Demeter, the earth-mother, may have clustered round the
+place, till the Phigalians were glad--for it was profitable as well as
+honourable--to believe that in their cavern Demeter sat mourning for the
+loss of Proserpine, whom Pluto had carried down to Hades, and all the
+earth was barren till Zeus sent the Fates, or Iris, to call her forth,
+and restore fertility to the world.  And it may be true--the legend as
+Pausanias tells it 600 years after--that the old wooden idol having been
+burnt, and the worship of Demeter neglected till a famine ensued, the
+Phigalians, warned by the Oracle of Delphi, hired Onatas, a contemporary
+of Polygnotus and Phidias, to make them a bronze replica of the old idol,
+from some old copy and from a dream of his own.  The story may be true.
+When Pausanias went thither, in the second century after Christ, the cave
+and the fountain, and the sacred grove of oaks, and the altar outside,
+which was to be polluted with the blood of no victim--the only offerings
+being fruits and honey, and undressed wool--were still there.  The statue
+was gone.  Some said it had been destroyed by the fall of the cliff; some
+were not sure that it had ever been there at all.  And meanwhile
+Praxiteles had already brought to perfection (Paus. 1, 2, sec. 4) the
+ideal of Demeter, mother-like, as Here--whom we still call Juno now--but
+softer-featured, and her eyes more closed.
+
+And so for mother earth, as for the rest, the best representation of the
+divine was the human.  Now, conceive such an idea taking hold, however
+slowly, of a people of rare physical beauty, of acutest eye for
+proportion and grace, with opportunities of studying the human figure
+such as exist nowhere now, save among tropic savages, and gifted,
+moreover, in that as in all other matters, with that innate diligence, of
+which Mr. Carlyle has said, 'that genius is only an infinite capacity of
+taking pains,' and we can understand somewhat of the causes which
+produced those statues, human and divine, which awe and shame the
+artificiality and degeneracy of our modern so-called civilisation--we can
+understand somewhat of the reverence for the human form, of the careful
+study of every line, the storing up for use each scattered fragment of
+beauty of which the artist caught sight, even in his daily walks, and
+consecrating it in his memory to the service of him or her whom he was
+trying to embody in marble or in bronze.  And when the fashion came in of
+making statues of victors in the games, and other distinguished persons,
+a new element was introduced, which had large social as well as artistic
+results.  The sculptor carried his usual reverence into his careful
+delineation of the victor's form, while he obtained in him a model,
+usually of the very highest type, for perfecting his idea of some
+divinity.  The possibility of gaining the right to a statue gave a fresh
+impulse to all competitors in the public games, and through them to the
+gymnastic training throughout all the states of Greece, which made the
+Greeks the most physically able and graceful, as well as the most
+beautiful people known to the history of the human race.  A people who,
+reverencing beauty, reverenced likewise grace or acted beauty, so utterly
+and honestly, that nothing was too humble for a free man to do, if it
+were not done awkwardly and ill.  As an instance, Sophocles himself--over
+and above his poetic genius, one of the most cultivated gentlemen, as
+well as one of the most exquisite musicians, dancers, and gymnasts, and
+one of the most just, pious, and gentle of all Greece--could not, by
+reason of the weakness of his voice, act in his own plays, as poets were
+wont to do, and had to perform only the office of stage-manager.  Twice
+he took part in the action, once as the blind old Thamyris playing on the
+harp, and once in his own lost tragedy, the 'Nausicaa.'  There in the
+scene in which the Princess, as she does in Homer's 'Odyssey,' comes down
+to the sea-shore with her maidens to wash the household clothes, and then
+to play at ball--Sophocles himself, a man then of middle age, did the one
+thing he could do better than any there--and, dressed in women's clothes,
+among the lads who represented the maidens, played at ball before the
+Athenian people.
+
+Yes: just 60 years after the representation of the _Antigone_, 10,000
+Greeks, far on the plains of Babylon, cut through the whole Persian army,
+as the railway train cuts through a herd of buffalo, and then losing all
+their generals by treacherous warfare, fought their way north from
+Babylon to Trebizond on the Black Sea, under the guidance of a young
+Athenian, a pupil of Socrates, who had never served in the army before.
+The retreat of Xenophon and his 10,000 will remain for ever as one of the
+grandest triumphs of civilisation over brute force: but what made it
+possible?  That these men, and their ancestors before them, had been for
+at least 100 years in _training_, physical, intellectual, and moral,
+which made their bodies and their minds able to dare and suffer like
+those old heroes of whom their tragedy had taught them, and whose spirits
+they still believed would help the valiant Greek.  And yet that feat,
+which looks to us so splendid, attracted, as far as I am aware, no
+special admiration at the time.  So was the cultivated Greek expected to
+behave whenever he came in contact with the uncultivated barbarian.
+
+But from what had sprung in that little state, this exuberance of
+splendid life, physical, aesthetic, intellectual, which made, and will
+make the name of Athens and of the whole cluster of Greek republics for
+ever admirable to civilised man?  Had it sprung from long years of
+peaceful prosperity?  From infinite making of money and comfort,
+according to the laws of so-called political economy, and the dictates of
+enlightened selfishness?  Not so.  But rather out of terror and agony,
+and all but utter ruin--and out of a magnificent want of economy--and the
+divine daring and folly--of self-sacrifice.
+
+In Salamis across the strait a trophy stood, and round that trophy, forty
+years before, Sophocles the author of _Antigone_, then sixteen years of
+age, the loveliest and most cultivated lad in Athens, undraped like a
+faun, with lyre in hand, was leading the Chorus of Athenian youths, and
+singing to Athene, the tutelary goddess, a hymn of triumph for a glorious
+victory,--the very symbol of Greece and Athens, springing up into a
+joyous second youth after invasion and desolation, as the grass springs
+up after the prairie fire has passed.  But the fire had been terrible.
+It had burnt Athens at least, down to the very roots.  True, while
+Sophocles was dancing, Xerxes, the great king of the East, foiled at
+Salamis, as his father Darius had been foiled at Marathon ten years
+before, was fleeing back to Persia, leaving his innumerable hosts of
+slaves and mercenaries to be destroyed piecemeal, by land at Platea, by
+sea at Mycale.  The bold hope was over, in which the Persian, ever since
+the days of Cyrus, had indulged--that he, the despot of the East, should
+be the despot of the West likewise.  It seemed to them as possible,
+though not as easy, to subdue the Aryan Greek, as it had been to subdue
+the Semite and the Turanian, the Babylonian, and the Syrian; to rifle his
+temples, to destroy his idols, carry off his women and children as
+colonists into distant lands, as they had been doing with all the nations
+of the East.  And they had succeeded with isolated colonies, isolated
+islands of Greeks, and the shores of Asia Minor.  But when they dared, at
+last, to attack the Greek in his own sacred land of Hellas, they found
+they had bearded a lion in his den.  Nay rather--as those old Greeks
+would have said--they had dared to attack Pallas Athene, the eldest
+daughter of Zeus--emblem of that serene and pure divine wisdom, of whom
+Solomon sang of old: 'The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way,
+before His works of old.  When He prepared the heavens, I was there, when
+He appointed the foundation of the earth, then was I by Him, as one
+brought up with Him, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before
+him: rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth; _and my delight was
+with the sons of men_,'--to attack her and her brother Apollo, Lord of
+light, and beauty, and culture, and grace, and inspiration,--to attack
+them, not in the name of Ormuzd, nor of any other deity, but in the name
+of mere brute force and lust of conquest.  The old Persian spirit was
+gone out of them.  They were the symbols now of nothing save despotism
+and self-will, wealth and self-indulgence.  They, once the children of
+Ormuzd or light, had become the children of Ahriman or darkness; and
+therefore it was, as I believe, that Xerxes' 1,000 ships, and the two
+million (or, as some have it, five million) human beings availed naught
+against the little fleets and little battalions of men who believed with
+a living belief in Athene and Apollo, and therefore--ponder it well, for
+it is true--with a living belief, under whatsoever confusions and
+divisions of personality, in a God who loved, taught, inspired men, a
+just God who befriended the righteous cause, the cause of freedom and
+patriotism, a Deity, the echo of whose mind and will to man was the song
+of Athene on Olympus, when she
+
+    Chanted of order and right, and of foresight, and order of peoples;
+    Chanted of labour and craft, wealth in the port and the garner;
+    Chanted of valour and fame, and the man who can fall with the
+    foremost,
+    Fighting for children and wife, and the field which his father
+    bequeathed him.
+    Sweetly and cunningly sang she, and planned new lessons for mortals.
+    Happy who hearing obey her, the wise unsullied Athene.
+
+Ah, that they had always obeyed her, those old Greeks.  But meanwhile, as
+I said, the agony had been extreme.  If Athens had sinned, she had been
+purged as by fire; and the fire--surely of God--had been terrible.
+Northern Greece had either been laid waste with fire and sword, or had
+gone over to the Persian, traitors in their despair.  Attica, almost the
+only loyal state, had been overrun; the old men, women, and children had
+fled to the neighbouring islands, or to the Peloponnese.  Athens itself
+had been destroyed; and while young Sophocles was dancing round the
+trophy at Salamis, the Acropolis was still a heap of blackened ruins.
+
+But over and above their valour, over and above their loyalty, over and
+above their exquisite aesthetic faculty, these Athenians had a resilience
+of self-reliant energy, like that of the French--like that, to do you but
+justice, of your Americans after your Chicago fire; and Athens rose from
+her ashes to be awhile, not only, as she had nobly earned by suffering
+and endurance, the leading state in Greece, but a mighty fortress, a rich
+commercial port, a living centre of art, poetry, philosophy, such as this
+earth has never seen before or since.
+
+On the plateau of that little crag of the Acropolis some 800 feet in
+length, by 400 in breadth--about the size and shape of the Castle Rock at
+Edinburgh--was gathered, within forty years of the battle of Salamis,
+more and more noble beauty than ever stood together on any other spot of
+like size.
+
+The sudden relief from crushing pressure, and the joyous consciousness of
+well-earned honours, made the whole spirit-nature of the people blossom
+out, as it were, into manifold forms of activity, beauty, research, and
+raised, in raising Greece, the whole human race thenceforth.
+
+What might they not have done--looking at what they actually did--for the
+whole race of man?
+
+But no--they fell, even more rapidly than they rose, till their grace and
+their cultivation, for them they could not lose, made them the willing
+ministers to the luxury, the frivolity, the sentimentality, the vice of
+the whole old world--the Scapia or Figaro of the old world--infinitely
+able, but with all his ability consecrated to the service of his own base
+self.  The Greekling--as Juvenal has it--in want of a dinner, would climb
+somehow to heaven itself, at the bidding of his Roman master.
+
+Ah, what a fall!  And what was the inherent weakness which caused that
+fall?
+
+I say at once--want of honesty.  The Greek was not to be depended on; if
+it suited him, he would lie, betray, overreach, change sides, and think
+it no sin.  He was the sharpest of men.  Sharp practice, in our modern
+sense of the word, was the very element in which he floated.  Any scholar
+knows it.  In the grand times of Marathon and Salamis, down to the
+disastrous times of the Peloponnesian war and the thirty tyrants, no
+public man's hands were clean, with the exception, perhaps, of that
+Aristides, who was banished because men were tired of hearing him called
+the Just.  The exciting cause of the Peloponnesian war, and the
+consequent downfall of Athens, was not merely the tyranny she exercised
+over the states allied to her, it was the sharp practice of the
+Athenians, in misappropriating the tribute paid by the allies to the
+decoration of Athens.  And in laying the foundations of the Parthenon was
+sown, by a just judgment, the seed of ruin for the state which gloried in
+it.  And if the rulers were such, what were the people?  If the free were
+such, what were the slaves?
+
+Hence, weakness at home and abroad, mistrust of generals and admirals,
+paralysing all bold and clear action, peculations and corruptions at
+home, internecine wars between factions inside states, and between states
+or groups of states, revolutions followed by despotism, and final
+exhaustion and slavery,-- slavery to a people who were coming across the
+western sea, hard-headed, hard-hearted, caring nothing for art, or
+science, whose pleasures were coarse and cruel, but with a certain rough
+honesty, reverence for country, for law, and for the ties of a
+family--men of a somewhat old English type, who had over and above, like
+the English, the inspiring belief that they could conquer the whole
+world, and who very nearly succeeded in that--as we have, to our great
+blessing, not succeeded--I mean, of course, the Romans.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE III.
+THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.
+
+
+Let me begin this lecture with a scene in the North Atlantic 863 years
+since.
+
+'Bjarne Grimolfson was blown with his ship into the Irish Ocean; and
+there came worms and the ship began to sink under them.  They had a boat
+which they had payed with seals' blubber, for that the sea-worms will not
+hurt.  But when they got into the boat they saw that it would not hold
+them all.  Then said Bjarne, "As the boat will only hold the half of us,
+my advice is that we should draw lots who shall go in her; for that will
+not be unworthy of our manhood."  This advice seemed so good that none
+gainsaid it; and they drew lots.  And the lot fell to Bjarne that he
+should go in the boat with half his crew.  But as he got into the boat,
+there spake an Icelander who was in the ship and had followed Bjarne from
+Iceland, "Art thou going to leave me here, Bjarne?"  Quoth Bjarne, "So it
+must be."  Then said the man, "Another thing didst thou promise my
+father, when I sailed with thee from Iceland, than to desert me thus.
+For thou saidst that we both should share the same lot."  Bjarne said,
+"And that we will not do.  Get thou down into the boat, and I will get up
+into the ship, now I see that thou art so greedy after life."  So Bjarne
+went up into the ship, and the man down into the boat; and the boat went
+on its voyage till they came to Dublin in Ireland.  But most men say that
+Bjarne and his comrades perished among the worms; for they were never
+heard of after.'
+
+This story may serve as a text for my whole lecture.  Not only does it
+smack of the sea-breeze and the salt water like all the finest old Norse
+sagas: but it gives a glimpse at least, of the nobleness which underlay
+the grim and often cruel nature of the Norseman.  It belongs, too, to the
+culminating epoch, to the beginning of that era when the Scandinavian
+peoples had their great times; when the old fierceness of the worshippers
+of Thor and Odin was tempered, without being effeminated by the Faith of
+the 'White Christ,' till the very men who had been the destroyers of
+Western Europe became its civilisers.
+
+It should have, moreover, a special interest to Americans.  For--as
+American antiquaries are well aware--Bjarne was on his voyage home from
+the coast of New England; possibly from that very Mount Hope Bay, which
+seems to have borne the same name in the time of those old Norsemen, as
+afterwards in the days of King Philip the last sachem of the Wampanong
+Indians.  He was going back to Greenland, perhaps for reinforcements,
+finding, he and his fellow-captain, Thorfinn, the Esquimaux who then
+dwelt in that land too strong for them.  For the Norsemen were then on
+the very edge of a discovery, which might have changed the history not
+only of this continent but of Europe likewise.  They had found and
+colonised Iceland and Greenland.  They had found Labrador, and called it
+Helluland, from its ice-polished rocks.  They had found Nova Scotia
+seemingly and called it Markland from its woods.  They had found New
+England and called it Vinland the Good.  A fair land they found it, well
+wooded, with good pasturage; so that they had already imported cows, and
+a bull whose lowings terrified the Esquimaux.  They had found self-sown
+corn too, probably maize.  The streams were full of salmon.  But they had
+called the land Vinland, by reason of its grapes.  Quaint enough, and
+bearing in its very quaintness the stamp of truth, is the story of the
+first finding of the wild fox-grapes.  How Leif the Fortunate, almost as
+soon as he first landed, missed a little wizened old German servant of
+his father's, Tyrker by name, and was much vexed thereat, for he had been
+brought up on the old man's knee, and hurrying off to find him met Tyrker
+coming back twisting his eyes about--a trick of his--smacking his lips
+and talking German to himself in high excitement.  And when they get him
+to talk Norse again, he says, 'I have not been far, but I have news for
+you.  I have found vines and grapes!'  'Is that true, foster-father?'
+says Leif.  'True it is,' says the old German, 'for I was brought up
+where there was never any lack of them.'  The saga--as given by Rafn--has
+a detailed description of this quaint personage's appearance; and it
+would not be amiss if American wine-growers should employ an American
+sculptor--and there are great American sculptors--to render that
+description into marble, and set up little Tyrker in some public place,
+as the Silenus of the New World.
+
+Thus the first cargoes homeward from Vinland to Greenland had been of
+timber and of raisins, and of vine-stocks which were not like to thrive.
+
+And more.  Beyond Vinland the Good there was said to be another land,
+Whiteman's Land--or Ireland the Mickle, as some called it.  For these
+Norse traders from Limerick had found Ari Marson, and Ketla of Ruykjanes,
+supposed to have been long since drowned at sea, and said that the people
+had made him and Ketla chiefs, and baptised Ari.  What is all this? and
+what is this, too, which the Esquimaux children taken in Markland told
+the Northmen, of a land beyond them where the folk wore white clothes,
+and carried flags on poles?  Are these all dreams? or was some part of
+that great civilisation, the relics whereof your antiquarians find in so
+many parts of the United States, still in existence some 900 years ago;
+and were these old Norse cousins of ours upon the very edge of it?  Be
+that as it may, how nearly did these fierce Vikings, some of whom seemed
+to have sailed far south along the shore, become aware that just beyond
+them lay a land of fruits and spices, gold, and gems?  The adverse
+current of the Gulf Stream, it may be, would have long prevented their
+getting past the Bahamas into the Gulf of Mexico; but, sooner or later,
+some storm must have carried a Greenland viking to San Domingo, or to
+Cuba; and then, as has been well said, some Scandinavian dynasty might
+have sat upon the throne of Mexico.
+
+These stories are well known to antiquarians.  They may be found, almost
+all of them, in Professor Rafn's _Antiquitates Americanae_.  The action
+in them stands out often so clear and dramatic, that the internal
+evidence of historic truth is irresistible.  Thorvald, who, when he saw
+what seems to be, they say, the bluff head of Alderton at the south-east
+end of Boston Bay, said, 'Here should I like to dwell,' and, shot by an
+Esquimaux arrow, bade bury him on that place, with a cross at his head
+and a cross at his feet, and call the place Cross Ness for evermore;
+Gudrida, the magnificent widow, who wins hearts and sees strange deeds
+from Iceland to Greenland, and Greenland to Vinland and back, and at
+last, worn out and sad, goes off on a pilgrimage to Rome; Helgi and
+Finnbogi, the Norwegians, who, like our Arctic voyagers in after times,
+devise all sorts of sports and games to keep the men in humour during the
+long winter at Hope; and last, but not least, the terrible Freydisa, who
+when the Norse are seized with a sudden panic at the Esquimaux, and flee
+from them, as they had three weeks before fled from Thorfinn's bellowing
+bull, turns, when so weak that she cannot escape, single-handed on the
+savages, and catching up a slain man's sword, puts them all to flight
+with her fierce visage and fierce cries--Freydisa the Terrible, who, in
+another voyage, persuades her husband to fall on Helgi and Finnbogi, when
+asleep, and murder them and all their men; and then, when he will not
+murder the five women too, takes up an axe and slays them all herself,
+and getting back to Greenland, when the dark and unexplained tale comes
+out, lives unpunished, but abhorred henceforth.  All these folks, I say,
+are no phantoms, but realities; at least, if I can judge of internal
+evidence.
+
+But, beyond them, and hovering on the verge of Mythus and fairy land,
+there is a ballad called 'Finn the Fair,' and how
+
+    An upland Earl had twa braw sons,
+       My story to begin;
+    The tane was hight Haldane the strong,
+       The tither was winsome Finn.
+
+and so forth; which was still sung, with other 'rimur,' or ballads, in
+the Faroes, at the end of the last century.  Professor Rafn has inserted
+it, because it talks of Vinland as a well-known place, and because the
+brothers are sent by the princess to slay American kings; but that Rime
+has another value.
+
+It is of a beauty so perfect, and yet so like the old Scotch ballads in
+its heroic conception of love, and in all its forms and its qualities,
+that it is one proof more, to any student of early European poetry, that
+we and these old Norsemen are men of the same blood.  Your own Professor
+Longfellow may know it far better than I, who am no Norse scholar.  But,
+if he does, might I beg him to translate it some day, as none but he can
+translate?  It is so sad, that no tenderness less exquisite than his can
+prevent its being painful; and, at least in its denouement, so naive,
+that no purity less exquisite than his can prevent its being dreadful.
+But the Rime is as worthy of Mr. Longfellow as he is worthy of the Rime.
+
+If anything more important than is told by Professor Rafn and Mr. Black
+{71} be now known to the antiquarians of Massachussets, let me entreat
+them to pardon my ignorance.  But let me record my opinion that, though
+somewhat too much may have been made in past years of certain
+rock-inscriptions, and so forth, on this side of the Atlantic, there can
+be no reasonable doubt that our own race landed and tried to settle on
+the shore of New England six hundred years before their kinsmen, and, in
+many cases, their actual descendants, the august Pilgrim Fathers of the
+17th century.  And so, as I said, a Scandinavian dynasty might have been
+seated now upon the throne of Mexico.  And how was that strange chance
+lost?  First, of course, by the length and danger of the coasting voyage.
+It was one thing to have, like Columbus and Vespucci, Cortes and Pizarro,
+the Azores as a half-way port; another to have Greenland, or even
+Iceland.  It was one thing to run South West upon Columbus' track, across
+the Mar de Damas, the Ladies Sea, which hardly knows a storm, with the
+blazing blue above, the blazing blue below, in an ever-warming climate,
+where every breath is life and joy; another to struggle against the fogs
+and icebergs, the rocks and currents, of the dreary North Atlantic.  No
+wonder, then, that the knowledge of Markland, and Vinland, and Whiteman's
+Land died away in a few generations, and became but fire-side sagas for
+the winter nights.
+
+But there were other causes, more honourable to the dogged energy of the
+Norse.  They were in those very years conquering and settling nearer home
+as no other people--unless, perhaps, the old Ionian Greeks, conquered and
+settled.
+
+Greenland, we have seen, they held--the western side at least--and held
+it long and well enough to afford, it is said, 2,600 pounds of walrus'
+teeth as yearly tithe to the Pope, besides Peter's pence, and to build
+many a convent, and church, and cathedral, with farms and homesteads
+round; for one saga speaks of Greenland as producing wheat of the finest
+quality.  All is ruined now, perhaps by gradual change of climate.
+
+But they had richer fields of enterprise than Greenland, Iceland, and the
+Faroes.  Their boldest outlaws at that very time--whether from Norway,
+Sweden, Denmark, or Britain--were forming the imperial life-guard of the
+Byzantine Emperor, as the once famous Varangers of Constantinople; and
+that splendid epoch of their race was just dawning, of which my lamented
+friend, the late Sir Edmund Head, says so well in his preface to Viga
+Glum's Icelandic _Saga_, 'The Sagas, of which this tale is one, were
+composed for the men who have left their mark in every corner of Europe;
+and whose language and laws are at this moment important elements in the
+speech and institutions of England, America, and Australia.  There is no
+page of modern history in which the influence of the Norsemen and their
+conquests must not be taken into account--Russia, Constantinople, Greece,
+Palestine, Sicily, the coasts of Africa, Southern Italy, France, the
+Spanish Peninsula, England, Scotland, Ireland, and every rock and island
+round them, have been visited, and most of them at one time or the other
+ruled, by the men of Scandinavia.  The motto on the sword of Roger
+Guiscard was a proud one:
+
+    Appulus et Calaber, Siculus mihi servit et Afer.'
+
+Every island, says Sir Edmund Head, and truly--for the name of almost
+every island on the coast of England, Scotland, and Eastern Ireland, ends
+in either _ey_ or _ay_ or _oe_, a Norse appellative, as is the word
+island itself--is a mark of its having been, at some time or other,
+visited by the Vikings of Scandinavia.
+
+Norway, meanwhile, was convulsed by war; and what perhaps was of more
+immediate consequence, Svend Fork-beard, whom we Englishmen call
+Sweyn--the renegade from that Christian Faith which had been forced on
+him by his German conqueror, the Emperor Otto II.--with his illustrious
+son Cnut, whom we call Canute, were just calling together all the most
+daring spirits of the Baltic coasts for the subjugation of England; and
+when that great feat was performed, the Scandinavian emigration was
+paralysed, probably, for a time by the fearful wars at home.  While the
+King of Sweden, and St. Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway, were setting on
+Denmark during Cnut's pilgrimage to Rome, and Cnut, sailing with a mighty
+fleet to Norway, was driving St. Olaf into Russia, to return and fall in
+the fratricidal battle of Stiklestead--during, strangely enough, a total
+eclipse of the sun--Vinland was like enough to remain still uncolonised.
+After Cnut's short-lived triumph--king as he was of Denmark, Norway,
+England, and half Scotland, and what not of Wendish Folk inside the
+Baltic--the force of the Norsemen seems to have been exhausted in their
+native lands.  Once more only, if I remember right, did 'Lochlin,' really
+and hopefully send forth her 'mailed swarm' to conquer a foreign land;
+and with a result unexpected alike by them and by their enemies.  Had it
+been otherwise, we might not have been here this day.
+
+Let me sketch for you once more--though you have heard it, doubtless,
+many a time--the tale of that tremendous fortnight which settled the fate
+of Britain, and therefore of North America; which decided--just in those
+great times when the decision was to be made--whether we should be on a
+par with the other civilised nations of Europe, like them the 'heirs of
+all the ages,' with our share not only of Roman Christianity and Roman
+centralisation--a member of the great comity of European nations, held
+together in one Christian bond by the Pope--but heirs also of Roman
+civilisation, Roman literature, Roman law; and therefore, in due time, of
+Greek philosophy and art.  No less a question than this, it seems to me,
+hung in the balance during that fortnight of autumn, 1066.
+
+Poor old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and sad, lay in his new choir
+of Westminster--where the wicked ceased from troubling, and the weary
+were at rest.  The crowned ascetic had left no heir behind.  England
+seemed as a corpse, to which all the eagles might gather together; and
+the South-English, in their utter need, had chosen for their king the
+ablest, and it may be the justest, man in Britain--Earl Harold
+Godwinsson: himself, like half the upper classes of England then, of the
+all-dominant Norse blood; for his mother was a Danish princess.  Then out
+of Norway, with a mighty host, came Harold Hardraade, taller than all
+men, the ideal Viking of his time.  Half-brother of the now dead St.
+Olaf, severely wounded when he was but fifteen, at Stiklestead, when Olaf
+fell, he had warred and plundered on many a coast.  He had been away to
+Russia to King Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor's Varanger guard at
+Constantinople--and, it was whispered, had slain a lion there with his
+bare hands; he had carved his name and his comrades' in Runic
+characters--if you go to Venice you may see them at this day--on the
+loins of the great marble lion, which stood in his time not in Venice but
+in Athens.  And now, king of Norway and conqueror, for the time, of
+Denmark, why should he not take England, as Sweyn and Canute took it
+sixty years before, when the flower of the English gentry perished at the
+fatal battle of Assingdune?  If he and his half-barbarous host had
+conquered, the civilisation of Britain would have been thrown back,
+perhaps, for centuries.  But it was not to be.
+
+England _was_ to be conquered by the Norman; but by the civilised, not
+the barbaric; by the Norse who had settled, but four generations before,
+in the North East of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the Ganger--so-called,
+they say, because his legs were so long that, when on horseback, he
+touched the ground and seemed to gang, or walk.  He and his Norsemen had
+taken their share of France, and called it Normandy to this day; and
+meanwhile, with that docility and adaptability which marks so often truly
+great spirits, they had changed their creed, their language, their
+habits, and had become, from heathen and murderous Berserkers, the most
+truly civilised people of Europe, and--as was most natural then--the most
+faithful allies and servants of the Pope of Rome.  So greatly had they
+changed, and so fast, that William Duke of Normandy, the
+great-great-grandson of Rolf the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest
+gentleman, as well as the most cultivated sovereign, and the greatest
+statesman and warrior, in all Europe.
+
+So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge by York;
+and took, by coming, only that which Harold of England promised him,
+namely, 'forasmuch as he was taller than any other man, seven feet of
+English ground.'
+
+The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but told as
+only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read it already,
+in the _Heimskringla_ of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North--
+
+    High feast that day held the birds of the air and the beasts of the
+    field,
+    White-tailed erne and sallow glede,
+    Dusky raven, with horny neb,
+    And the grey deer, the wolf of the wood.
+
+The bones of the slain, men say, whitened the place for fifty years to
+come.
+
+And remember, that on the same day on which that fight befell--Sept. 27,
+1066--William, Duke of Normandy, with all his French-speaking Norsemen,
+was sailing across the British Channel, under the protection of a banner
+consecrated by the Pope, to conquer that England which the Norse-speaking
+Normans could not conquer.
+
+And now King Harold showed himself a man.  He turned at once from the
+North of England to the South.  He raised the folk of the Southern, as he
+had raised those of the Central and Northern shires; and in sixteen
+days--after a march which in those times was a prodigious feat--he was
+entrenched upon the fatal down which men called Heathfield then, and
+Senlac, but Battle to this day--with William and his French Normans
+opposite him on Telham hill.
+
+Then came the battle of Hastings.  You all know what befell upon that
+day; and how the old weapon was matched against the new--the English axe
+against the Norman lance--and beaten only because the English broke their
+ranks.  If you wish to refresh your memories, read the tale once more in
+Mr. Freeman's _History of England_, or Prof. Creasy's _Fifteen Decisive
+Battles of the World_, or even, best of all, the late Lord Lytton's
+splendid romance of _Harold_.  And when you go to England, go, as some of
+you may have gone already, to Battle; and there from off the Abbey
+grounds, or from Mountjoy behind, look down off what was then 'The Heathy
+Field,' over the long slopes of green pasture and the rich hop-gardens,
+where were no hop-gardens then, and the flat tide-marshes winding between
+the wooded heights, towards the southern sea; and imagine for yourselves
+the feelings of an Englishman as he contemplates that broad green sloping
+lawn, on which was decided the destiny of his native land.  Here, right
+beneath, rode Taillefer up the slope before them all, singing the song of
+Roland, tossing his lance in air and catching it as it fell, with all the
+Norse berserker spirit of his ancestors flashing out in him, at the
+thought of one fair fight, and then purgatory, or Valhalla--Taillefer
+perhaps preferred the latter.  Yonder on the left, in that copse where
+the red-ochre gully runs, is Sanguelac, the drain of blood, into which
+(as the Bayeux tapestry, woven by Matilda's maids, still shows) the
+Norman knights fell, horse and man, till the gully was bridged with
+writhing bodies for those who rode after.  Here, where you stand--the
+crest of the hill marks where it must have been--was the stockade on
+which depended the fate of England.  Yonder, perhaps, stalked out one
+English squire or house-carle after another: tall men with long-handled
+battle-axes--one specially terrible, with a wooden helmet which no sword
+could pierce--who hewed and hewed down knight on knight, till they
+themselves were borne to earth at last.  And here, among the trees and
+ruins of the garden, kept trim by those who know the treasure which they
+own, stood Harold's two standards of the fighting man and the dragon of
+Wessex.  And here, close by (for here, for many a century, stood the high
+altar of Battle Abbey, where monks sang masses for Harold's soul), upon
+this very spot the Swan-neck found her hero lover's corpse.  'Ah,' says
+many an Englishman--and who will blame him for it--'how grand to have
+died beneath that standard on that day!'  Yes, and how right.  And yet
+how right, likewise, that the Norman's cry of Dexaie, 'God Help,' and not
+the English hurrah, should have won that day, till William rode up
+Mountjoye in the afternoon to see the English army, terrible even in
+defeat, struggling through copse and marsh away toward Brede, and, like
+retreating lions driven into their native woods, slaying more in the
+pursuit than they slew even in the fight.
+
+But so it was to be; for so it ought to have been.  You, my American
+friends, delight, as I have said already, in seeing the old places of the
+old country.  Go, I beg you, and look at that old place, and if you be
+wise, you will carry back from it one lesson: that God's thoughts are not
+as our thoughts; nor His ways as our ways.
+
+It was a fearful time which followed.  I cannot but believe that our
+forefathers had been, in some way or other, great sinners, or two such
+conquests as Canute's and William's would not have fallen on them within
+the short space of sixty years.  They did not want for courage, as
+Stanford Brigg and Hastings showed full well.  English swine, their
+Norman conquerors called them often enough; but never English cowards.
+Their ruinous vice, if we are to trust the records of the time, was what
+the old monks called accidia--[Greek text]--and ranked it as one of the
+seven deadly sins: a general careless, sleepy, comfortable habit of mind,
+which lets all go its way for good or evil--a habit of mind too often
+accompanied, as in the case of the Anglo-Danes, with self-indulgence,
+often coarse enough.  Huge eaters and huger drinkers, fuddled with ale,
+were the men who went down at Hastings--though they went down like
+heroes--before the staid and sober Norman out of France.
+
+But those were fearful times.  As long as William lived, ruthless as he
+was to all rebels, he kept order and did justice with a strong and steady
+hand; for he brought with him from Normandy the instincts of a truly
+great statesman.  And in his sons' time matters grew worse and worse.
+After that, in the troubles of Stephen's reign, anarchy let loose tyranny
+in its most fearful form, and things were done which recall the cruelties
+of the old Spanish conquistadores in America.  Scott's charming romance
+of _Ivanhoe_ must be taken, I fear, as a too true picture of English
+society in the time of Richard I.
+
+And what came of it all?  What was the result of all this misery and
+wrong?
+
+This, paradoxical as it may seem--that the Norman conquest was the making
+of the English people; of the Free Commons of England.
+
+Paradoxical, but true.  First, you must dismiss from your minds the too
+common notion that there is now, in England a governing Norman
+aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year 1215,
+when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and by English
+alike.  For the first victors at Hastings, like the first conquistadores
+in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point out, rapidly by their
+own crimes; and very few of our nobility can trace their names back to
+the authentic Battle Abbey roll.  The great majority of the peers have
+sprung from, and all have intermarried with, the Commons; and the peerage
+has been from the first, and has become more and more as centuries have
+rolled on, the prize of success in life.
+
+The cause is plain.  The conquest of England by the Normans was not one
+of those conquests of a savage by a civilised race, or of a cowardly race
+by a brave race, which results in the slavery of the conquered, and
+leaves the gulf of caste between two races, master and slave.  That was
+the case in France, and resulted, after centuries of oppression, in the
+great and dreadful revolution of 1793, which convulsed not only France
+but the whole civilised world.  But caste, thank God, has never existed
+in England, since at least the first generation after the Norman
+conquest.
+
+The vast majority, all but the whole population of England, have been
+always free; and free, as they are not where caste exists, to change
+their occupations.  They could intermarry, if they were able men, into
+the ranks above them; as they did sink, if they were unable men, into the
+ranks below them.  Any man acquainted with the origin of our English
+surnames may verify this fact for himself, by looking at the names of a
+single parish or a single street of shops.  There, jumbled together, he
+will find names marking the noblest Saxon or Angle blood--Kenward or
+Kenric, Osgood or Osborne, side by side with Cordery or Banister--now
+names of farmers in my own parish--or other Norman-French names which may
+be, like those two last, in Battle Abbey roll--and side by side the
+almost ubiquitous Brown, whose ancestor was probably some Danish or
+Norwegian housecarle, proud of his name Biorn the bear, and the
+ubiquitous Smith or Smythe, the smiter, whose forefather, whether he now
+be peasant or peer, assuredly handled the tongs and hammer at his own
+forge.  This holds true equally in New England and in Old.  When I search
+through (as I delight to do) your New England surnames, I find the same
+jumble of names--West Saxon, Angle, Danish, Norman, and French-Norman
+likewise, many of primaeval and heathen antiquity, many of high nobility,
+all worked together, as at home, to form the Free Commoners of England.
+
+If any should wish to know more on this curious and important subject,
+let me recommend them to study Ferguson's _Teutonic Name System_, a book
+from which you will discover that some of our quaintest, and seemingly
+most plebeian surnames--many surnames, too, which are extinct in England,
+but remain in America--are really corruptions of good old Teutonic names,
+which our ancestors may have carried in the German Forest, before an
+Englishman set foot on British soil; from which he will rise with the
+comfortable feeling that we English-speaking men, from the highest to the
+lowest, are literally kinsmen.  Nay, so utterly made up now is the old
+blood-feud between Norseman and Englishman, between the descendants of
+those who conquered and those who were conquered, that in the children of
+our Prince of Wales, after 800 years, the blood of William of Normandy is
+mingled with the blood of the very Harold who fell at Hastings.  And so,
+by the bitter woes which followed the Norman conquest was the whole
+population, Dane, Angle, and Saxon, earl and churl, freeman and slave,
+crushed and welded together into one homogeneous mass, made just and
+merciful towards each other by the most wholesome of all teachings, a
+community of suffering; and if they had been, as I fear they were, a lazy
+and a sensual people, were taught
+
+    That life is not as idle ore,
+    But heated hot with burning fears,
+    And bathed in baths of hissing tears,
+    And battered with the strokes of doom
+    To shape and use.
+
+But how did these wild Vikings become Christian men?  It is a long story.
+So staunch a race was sure to be converted only very slowly.  Noble
+missionaries as Ansgar, Rembert, and Poppo, had worked for 150 years and
+more among the heathens of Denmark.  But the patriotism of the Norseman
+always recoiled, even though in secret, from the fact that they were
+German monks, backed by the authority of the German emperor; and many a
+man, like Svend Fork-beard, father of the great Canute, though he had the
+Kaiser himself for godfather, turned heathen once more, the moment he was
+free, because his baptism was the badge of foreign conquest, and neither
+pope nor Kaiser should lord it over him, body or soul.  St. Olaf, indeed,
+forced Christianity on the Norse at the sword's point, often by horrid
+cruelties, and perished in the attempt.  But who forced it on the
+Norsemen of Scotland, England, Ireland, Neustria, Russia, and all the
+Eastern Baltic?  It was absorbed and in most cases, I believe, gradually
+and willingly, as a gospel and good news to hearts worn out with the
+storm of their own passions.  And whence came their Christianity?  Much
+of it, as in the case of the Danes, and still more of the French Normans,
+came direct from Rome, the city which, let them defy its influence as
+they would, was still the fount of all theology, as well as of all
+civilisation.  But I must believe that much of it came from that
+mysterious ancient Western Church, the Church of St. Patric, St. Bridget,
+St. Columba, which had covered with rude cells and chapels the rocky
+islets of the North Atlantic, even to Iceland itself.  Even to Iceland;
+for when that island was first discovered, about A.D. 840, the Norsemen
+found in an isle, on the east and west and elsewhere, Irish books and
+bells and wooden crosses, and named that island Papey, the isle of the
+popes--some little colony of monks, who lived by fishing, and who are
+said to have left the land when the Norsemen settled in it.  Let us
+believe, for it is consonant with reason and experience, that the sight
+of those poor monks, plundered and massacred again and again by the
+'mailed swarms of Lochlin,' yet never exterminated, but springing up
+again in the same place, ready for fresh massacre, a sacred plant which
+God had planted, and which no rage of man could trample out--let us
+believe, I say, that that sight taught at last to the buccaneers of the
+old world that there was a purer manliness, a loftier heroism, than the
+ferocious self-assertion of the Berserker, even the heroism of humility,
+gentleness, self-restraint, self-sacrifice.  That there was a strength
+which was made perfect in weakness; a glory, not of the sword but of the
+cross.  We will believe that that was the lesson which the Norsemen
+learnt, after many a wild and bloodstained voyage, from the monks of Iona
+or of Derry, which caused the building of such churches as that which
+Sightrys, king of Dublin, raised about the year 1030, not in the Norse
+but in the Irish quarter of Dublin: a sacred token of amity between the
+new settlers and the natives on the ground of a common faith.  Let us
+believe, too, that the influence of woman was not wanting in the good
+work--that the story of St. Margaret and Malcolm Canmore was repeated,
+though inversely, in the case of many a heathen Scandinavian jarl, who,
+marrying the princely daughter of some Scottish chieftain, found in her
+creed at last something more precious than herself; while his brother or
+his cousin became, at Dublin or Wexford or Waterford, the husband of some
+saffron-robed Irish princess, 'fair as an elf,' as the old saying was;
+'some maiden of the three transcendent hues,' of whom the old book of
+Linane says--
+
+    Red as the blood which flowed from stricken deer,
+    White as the snow on which that blood ran down,
+    Black as the raven who drank up that blood.
+
+--and possibly, as in the case of Brian Boru's mother, had given his
+fair-haired sister in marriage to some Irish prince, and could not resist
+the spell of their new creed, and the spell too, it may be, of some
+sister of theirs who had long given up all thought of earthly marriage to
+tend the undying fire of St. Bridget among the consecrated virgins of
+Kildare.
+
+I am not drawing from mere imagination.  That such things must have
+happened, and happened again and again, is certain to anyone who knows,
+even superficially, the documents of that time.  And I doubt not that, in
+manners as well as in religion, the Norse were humanised and civilised by
+their contact with the Celts, both in Scotland and in Ireland, Both
+peoples had valour, intellect, imagination: but the Celt had that which
+the burly angular Norse character, however deep and stately, and however
+humorous, wanted; namely, music of nature, tenderness, grace, rapidity,
+playfulness; just the qualities, combining with the Scandinavian (and in
+Scotland with the Angle) elements of character which have produced, in
+Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric poetry second to none in
+the world.
+
+And so they were converted to what was then a dark and awful creed; a
+creed of ascetic self-torture and purgatorial fires for those who escaped
+the still more dreadful, because endless, doom of the rest of the human
+race.  But, because it was a sad creed, it suited better men, who had,
+when conscience reawakened in them, but too good reason to be sad; and
+the minsters and cloisters which sprang up over the whole of Northern
+Europe, and even beyond it, along the dreary western shores of Greenland
+itself, are the symbols of a splendid repentance for their own sins and
+for the sins of their forefathers.
+
+Gudruna herself, of whom I spoke just now, one of those old Norse
+heroines who helped to discover America, though a historic personage, is
+a symbolic one likewise, and the pattern of a whole class.  She, too,
+after many journeys to Iceland, Greenland, and Winland, goes on a
+pilgrimage to Rome, to get, I presume, absolution from the Pope himself
+for all the sins of her strange, rich, stormy, wayward life.
+
+Have you not read--many of you surely have--La Motte Fouque's _Romance of
+Sintram_?  It embodies all that I would say.  It is the spiritual drama
+of that early middle age; very sad, morbid if you will, but true to fact.
+The Lady Verena ought not, perhaps, to desert her husband, and shut
+herself up in a cloister.  But so she would have done in those old days.
+And who shall judge her harshly for so doing?  When the brutality of the
+man seems past all cure, who shall blame the woman if she glides away
+into some atmosphere of peace and purity, to pray for him whom neither
+warnings nor caresses will amend?  It is a sad book, _Sintram_.  And yet
+not too sad.  For they were a sad people, those old Norse forefathers of
+ours.  Their Christianity was sad; their minsters sad; there are few
+sadder, though few grander, buildings than a Norman church.
+
+And yet, perhaps, their Christianity did not make them sad.  It was but
+the other and the healthier side of that sadness which they had as
+heathens.  Read which you will of the old sagas--heathen or
+half-Christian--the Eyrbiggia, Viga Glum, Burnt Niall, Grettir the
+Strong, and, above all, Snorri Sturluson's _Heimskringla_ itself--and you
+will see at once how sad they are.  There is, in the old sagas, none of
+that enjoyment of life which shines out everywhere in Greek poetry, even
+through its deepest tragedies.  Not in complacency with Nature's beauty,
+but in the fierce struggle with her wrath, does the Norseman feel
+pleasure.  Nature to him was not, as in Mr. Longfellow's exquisite poem,
+{91} the kind old nurse, to take him on her knee and whisper to him, ever
+anew, the story without an end.  She was a weird witch-wife, mother of
+storm demons and frost giants, who must be fought with steadily, warily,
+wearily, over dreary heaths and snow-capped fells, and rugged nesses and
+tossing sounds, and away into the boundless sea--or who could live?--till
+he got hardened in the fight into ruthlessness of need and greed.  The
+poor strip of flat strath, ploughed and re-ploughed again in the short
+summer days, would yield no more; or wet harvests spoiled the crops, or
+heavy snows starved the cattle.  And so the Norseman launched his ships
+when the lands were sown in spring, and went forth to pillage or to
+trade, as luck would have, to summerted, as he himself called it; and
+came back, if he ever came, in autumn to the women to help at
+harvest-time, with blood upon his hand.  But had he staid at home, blood
+would have been there still.  Three out of four of them had been mixed up
+in some man-slaying, or had some blood-feud to avenge among their own
+kin.
+
+The whole of Scandinavia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Orkney, and the rest,
+remind me ever of that terrible picture of the great Norse painter,
+Tiddeman, in which two splendid youths, lashed together, in true Norse
+duel fashion by the waist, are hewing each other to death with the short
+axe, about some hot words over their ale.  The loss of life, and that of
+the most gallant of the young, in those days must have been enormous.  If
+the vitality of the race had not been even more enormous, they must have
+destroyed each other, as the Red Indians have done, off the face of the
+earth.  They lived these Norsemen, not to live--they lived to die.  For
+what cared they?  Death--what was death to them! what it was to the
+Jomsburger Viking, who, when led out to execution, said to the headsman,
+'Die! with all pleasure.  We used to question in Jomsburg whether a man
+felt when his head was off?  Now I shall know; but if I do, take care,
+for I shall smite thee with my knife.  And meanwhile, spoil not this long
+hair of mine; it is so beautiful.'
+
+But, oh! what waste.  What might not these men have done if they had
+sought peace, not war; if they had learned a few centuries sooner to do
+justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their God?
+
+And yet one loves them, blood-stained as they are.  Your own poets, men
+brought up under circumstances, under ideas the most opposite to theirs,
+love them, and cannot help it.  And why?  It is not merely for their bold
+daring, it is not merely for their stern endurance; nor again that they
+had in them that shift and thrift, those steady and common-sense business
+habits, which made their noblest men not ashamed to go on voyages of
+merchandise.  Nor is it, again, that grim humour--humour as of the modern
+Scotch--which so often flashes out into an actual jest, but more usually
+underlies unspoken all their deeds.  Is it not rather that these men are
+our forefathers? that their blood runs in the veins of perhaps three men
+out of four in any general assembly, whether in America or in Britain?
+Startling as the assertion may be, I believe it to be strictly true.
+
+Be that as it may, I cannot read the stories of your western men, the
+writings of Bret Harte, or Colonel John Hay, for instance, without
+feeling at every turn that there are the old Norse alive again, beyond
+the very ocean which they first crossed, 850 years ago.
+
+Let me try to prove my point, and end with a story, as I began with one.
+
+It is just 30 years before the Norman conquest of England, the evening of
+the battle of Sticklestead.  St. Olaf's corpse is still lying unburied on
+the hillside.  The reforming and Christian king has fallen in the attempt
+to force Christianity and despotism on the Conservative and half-heathen
+party--the free bonders or yeoman-farmers of Norway.  Thormod, his
+poet,--the man, as his name means, of thunder mood--who has been standing
+in the ranks, at last has an arrow in his left side.  He breaks off the
+shaft, and thus sore wounded goes up, when all is lost, to a farm where
+is a great barn full of wounded.  One Kimbe comes, a man out of the
+opposite or bonder part.  'There is great howling and screaming in
+there,' he says.  'King Olaf's men fought bravely enough: but it is a
+shame brisk young lads cannot bear their wounds.  On what side wert thou
+in the fight?'  'On the best side,' says the beaten Thormod.  Kimbe sees
+that Thormod has a gold bracelet on his arm.  'Thou art surely a king's
+man.  Give me thy gold ring and I will hide thee, ere the bonders kill
+thee.'
+
+Thormod said, 'Take it, if thou canst get it.  I have lost that which is
+worth more;' and he stretched out his left hand, and Kimbe tried to take
+it.  But Thormod, swinging his sword, cut off his hand; and it is said
+Kimbe behaved no better over his wound than those he had been blaming.
+
+Then Thormod went into the barn; and after he had sung his song there in
+praise of his dead king, he went into an inner room, where was a fire,
+and water warming, and a handsome girl binding up men's wounds.  And he
+sat down by the door; and one said to him 'Why art thou so dead pale?
+Why dost thou not call for the leech?'  Then sung Thormod--
+
+    I am not blooming; and the fair
+    And slender maiden loves to care
+    For blooming youths.  Few care for me,
+    With Fenri's gold meal I can't fee;
+
+and so forth, improvising after the old Norse fashion.
+
+Then Thormod got up and went to the fire, and stood and warmed himself.
+And the nurse-girl said to him, 'Go out man, and bring some of the
+split-firewood which lies outside the door.'  He went out and brought an
+armful of wood and threw it down.  Then the nurse-girl looked him in the
+face and said, 'Dreadful pale is this man.  Why art thou so?'  Then sang
+Thormod--
+
+    Thou wonderest, sweet bloom, at me,
+    A man so hideous to see.
+    The arrow-drift o'ertook me, girl,
+    A fine-ground arrow in the whirl
+    Went through me, and I feel the dart
+    Sits, lovely lass, too near my heart.
+
+The girl said, 'Let me see thy wound.'  Then Thormod sat down, and the
+girl saw his wounds, and that which was in his side, and saw that there
+was a piece of iron in it; but could not tell where it had gone.  In a
+stone pot she had leeks and other herbs, and boiled them, and gave the
+wounded men of it to eat.  But Thormod said, 'Take it away; I have no
+appetite now for my broth.'  Then she took a great pair of tongs and
+tried to pull out the iron; but the wound was swelled, and there was too
+little to lay hold of.  Now said Thormod, 'Cut in so deep that thou canst
+get at the iron, and give me the tongs.'  She did as he said.  Then took
+Thormod the gold bracelet off his hand and gave it the nurse-girl, and
+bade her do with it what she liked.
+
+'It is a good man's gift,' said he.  'King Olaf gave me the ring this
+morning.'
+
+Then Thormod took the tongs and pulled the iron out.  But on the iron was
+a barb, on which hung flesh from the heart, some red, some white.  When
+he saw that, he said, 'The king has fed us well.  I am fat, even to the
+heart's roots.'  And so leant back and was dead.
+
+I shall not insult your intelligence by any comment or even epithet of my
+own.  I shall but ask you was not this man your kinsman?  Does not the
+story sound, allowing for all change of manners as well as of time and
+place, like a scene out of your own Bret Harte or Colonel John Hay's
+writings; a scene of the dry humour the rough heroism of your own far
+West?  Yes, as long as you have your _Jem Bludsos_ and _Tom Flynns of
+Virginia City_, the old Norse blood is surely not extinct, the old Norse
+spirit is not dead.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE IV.
+THE SERVANT OF THE LORD.
+
+
+I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old despotic empires
+which were in every case the earliest known form of civilisation.  Were I
+minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some corrupt
+and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its decay--as
+did at last the Roman and then the Byzantine Empire--and, after raising a
+laugh at the expense of the old system say, See what a superior people
+you are now,--how impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is
+anything so base and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before
+the Revolution of 1793.  Well that would be on the whole true, thank God;
+but what need is there to say it?
+
+Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own sins,
+certain that we shall gain more instruction, though not more amusement,
+by hunting out the good which is in anything than by hunting out its
+evil.  For me, true to that which I proposed in my last lecture, I have
+chosen, not the worst, but the best despotism which I could find in
+history, founded and ruled by a truly heroic personage, one whose name
+has become a proverb and a legend, that so I might lift up your minds,
+even by the contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to see that it, too,
+could be a work and ordinance of God, and its hero the servant of the
+Lord.  For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the Persian
+Empire, by this august title for two reasons--First, because the Hebrew
+Scriptures call him so; and next, because he proved himself to be such by
+his actions and their consequences--at least in the eyes of those who
+believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-reaching Providence, by which
+all human history is--
+
+    Bound by gold chains unto the throne of God.
+
+His work was very different from any that need be done, or can be done,
+in these our days.  But while we thank God that such work is now as
+unnecessary as impossible; we may thank God likewise that, when such work
+was necessary and possible, a man was raised up to do it; and to do it,
+as all accounts assert, better, perhaps, than it had ever been done
+before or since.
+
+True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation after nation, tribe after
+tribe, and founded empires on their ruins, are now, I trust, about to be
+replaced, throughout the world, as here and in Britain at home, by free
+self-governed peoples--
+
+    The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
+    And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
+    Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
+
+And that custom of conquest and empire and transplantation did more than
+once corrupt the world.  And yet in it, too, God may have more than once
+fulfilled his own designs, as He did, if Scripture is to be believed, in
+Cyrus, well surnamed the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire some
+2,400 years ago.  For these empires, it must be remembered, did at least
+that which the Roman Empire did among a scattered number of savage
+tribes, or separate little races, hating and murdering each other,
+speaking different tongues, and worshipping different gods, and losing
+utterly the sense of a common humanity, till they looked on the people
+who dwelt in the next valley as fiends, to be sacrificed, if caught, to
+their own fiends at home.  Among such as these, empires did introduce
+order, law, common speech, common interest, the notion of nationality and
+humanity.  They, as it were, hammered together the fragments of the human
+race till they had moulded them into one.  They did it cruelly, clumsily,
+ill: but was there ever work done on earth, however noble, which was
+not--alas, alas!--done somewhat ill?
+
+Let me talk to you a little about the old hero.  He and his hardy
+Persians should be specially interesting to us.  For in them first does
+our race, the Aryan race, appear in authentic history.  In them first did
+our race give promise of being the conquering and civilising race of the
+future world.  And to the conquests of Cyrus--so strangely are all great
+times and great movements of the human family linked to each other--to
+his conquests, humanly speaking, is owing the fact that you are here, and
+I am speaking to you at this moment.
+
+It is an oft-told story: but so grand a one that I must sketch it for
+you, however clumsily, once more.
+
+In that mountain province called Farsistan, north-east of what we now
+call Persia, the dwelling place of the Persians, there dwelt, in the
+sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, a hardy tribe, of the purest
+blood of Iran, a branch of the same race as the Celtic, Teutonic, Greek,
+and Hindoo, and speaking a tongue akin to theirs.  They had wandered
+thither, said their legends, out of the far north-east, from off some
+lofty plateau of Central Asia, driven out by the increasing cold, which
+left them but two months of summer to ten of winter.
+
+They despised at first--would that they had despised always!--the
+luxurious life of the dwellers in the plains, and the effeminate customs
+of the Medes--a branch of their own race who had conquered and
+intermarried with the Turanian, or Finnish tribes; and adopted much of
+their creed, as well as of their morals, throughout their vast but
+short-lived Median Empire.  'Soft countries,' said Cyrus himself--so runs
+the tale--'gave birth to small men.  No region produced at once
+delightful fruits and men of a warlike spirit.'  Letters were to them,
+probably then unknown.  They borrowed them in after years, as they
+borrowed their art, from Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Semitic
+nations whom they conquered.  From the age of five to that of twenty,
+their lads were instructed but in two things--to speak the truth and to
+shoot with the bow.  To ride was the third necessary art, introduced,
+according to Xenophon, after they had descended from their mountain
+fastnesses to conquer the whole East.
+
+Their creed was simple enough.  Ahura Mazda--Ormuzd, as he has been
+called since--was the one eternal Creator, the source of all light and
+life and good.  He spake his word, and it accomplished the creation of
+heaven, before the water, before the earth, before the cow, before the
+tree, before the fire, before man the truthful, before the Devas and
+beasts of prey, before the whole existing universe; before every good
+thing created by Ahura Mazda and springing from Truth.
+
+He needed no sacrifices of blood.  He was to be worshipped only with
+prayers, with offerings of the inspiring juice of the now unknown herb
+Homa, and by the preservation of the sacred fire, which, understand, was
+not he, but the symbol--as was light and the sun--of the good spirit--of
+Ahura Mazda.  They had no images of the gods, these old Persians; no
+temples, no altars, so says Herodotus, and considered the use of them a
+sign of folly.  They were, as has been well said of them, the Puritans of
+the old world.  When they descended from their mountain fastnesses, they
+became the iconoclasts of the old world; and the later Isaiah, out of the
+depths of national shame, captivity and exile, saw in them
+brother-spirits, the chosen of the Lord, whose hero Cyrus, the Lord was
+holding by his right hand, till all the foul superstitions and foul
+effeminacies of the rotten Semitic peoples of the East, and even of Egypt
+itself, should be crushed, though alas! only for a while, by men who felt
+that they had a commission from the God of light and truth and purity, to
+sweep out all that with the besom of destruction.
+
+But that was a later inspiration.  In earlier, and it may be happier,
+times, the duty of the good man was to strive against all evil, disorder,
+uselessness, incompetence in their more simple forms.  'He therefore is a
+holy man,' says Ormuzd in the Zend-avesta, 'who has built a dwelling on
+the earth, in which he maintains fire, cattle, his wife, his children,
+and flocks and herds; he who makes the earth produce barley, he who
+cultivates the fruits of the soil, cultivates purity; he advances the law
+of Ahura Mazda as much as if he had offered a hundred sacrifices.'
+
+To reclaim the waste, to till the land, to make a corner of the earth
+better than they found it, was to these men to rescue a bit of Ormuzd's
+world out of the usurped dominion of Ahriman; to rescue it from the
+spirit of evil and disorder for its rightful owner, the Spirit of Order
+and of Good.
+
+For they believed in an evil spirit, these old Persians.  Evil was not
+for them a lower form of good.  With their intense sense of the
+difference between right and wrong it could be nothing less than hateful;
+to be attacked, exterminated, as a personal enemy, till it became to them
+at last impersonate and a person.
+
+Zarathustra, the mystery of evil, weighed heavily on them and on their
+great prophet, Zoroaster--splendour of gold, as I am told his name
+signifies--who lived, no man knows clearly when or clearly where, but who
+lived and lives for ever, for his works follow him.  He, too, tried to
+solve for his people the mystery of evil; and if he did not succeed, who
+has succeeded yet?  Warring against Ormuzd, Ahura Mazda, was Ahriman,
+Angra Mainyus, literally the being of an evil mind, the ill-conditioned
+being.  He was labouring perpetually to spoil the good work of Ormuzd
+alike in nature and in man.  He was the cause of the fall of man, the
+tempter, the author of misery and death; he was eternal and uncreate as
+Ormuzd was.  But that, perhaps, was a corruption of the purer and older
+Zoroastrian creed.  With it, if Ahriman were eternal in the past, he
+would not be eternal in the future.  Somehow, somewhen, somewhere, in the
+day when three prophets--the increasing light, the increasing truth, and
+the existing truth--should arise and give to mankind the last three books
+of the Zend-avesta, and convert all mankind to the pure creed, then evil
+should be conquered, the creation become pure again, and Ahriman vanish
+for ever; and, meanwhile, every good man was to fight valiantly for
+Ormuzd, his true lord, against Ahriman and all his works.
+
+Men who held such a creed, and could speak truth and draw the bow, what
+might they not do when the hour and the man arrived?  They were not a
+_big_ nation.  No; but they were a great nation, even while they were
+eating barley-bread and paying tribute to their conquerors the Medes, in
+the sterile valleys of Farsistan.
+
+And at last the hour and the man came.  The story is half
+legendary--differently told by different authors.  Herodotus has one
+tale, Xenophon another.  The first, at least, had ample means of
+information.  Astyages is the old shah of the Median Empire, then at the
+height of its seeming might and splendour and effeminacy.  He has married
+his daughter, the princess Mandane, to Cambyses, seemingly a vassal-king
+or prince of the pure Persian blood.  One night the old man is troubled
+with a dream.  He sees a vine spring from his daughter, which overshadows
+all Asia.  He sends for the Magi to interpret; and they tell him that
+Mandane will have a son who will reign in his stead.  Having sons of his
+own, and fearing for the succession, he sends for Mandane, and, when her
+child is born, gives it to Harpagus, one of his courtiers, to be slain.
+The courtier relents, and hands it over to a herdsman, to be exposed on
+the mountains.  The herdsman relents in turn, and brings the babe up as
+his own child.
+
+When the boy, who goes by the name of Agradates, is grown, he is at play
+with the other herd-boys, and they choose him for a mimic king.  Some he
+makes his guards, some he bids build houses, some carry his messages.
+The son of a Mede of rank refuses, and Agradates has him seized by his
+guards and chastised with the whip.  The ancestral instincts of command
+and discipline are showing early in the lad.
+
+The young gentleman complains to his father, the father to the old king,
+who of course sends for the herdsman and his boy.  The boy answers in a
+tone so exactly like that in which Xenophon's Cyrus would have answered,
+that I must believe that both Xenophon's Cyrus and Herodotus' Cyrus (like
+Xenophon's Socrates and Plato's Socrates) are real pictures of a real
+character; and that Herodotus' story, though Xenophon says nothing of it,
+is true.
+
+He has done nothing, the noble boy says, but what was just.  He had been
+chosen king in play, because the boys thought him most fit.  The boy whom
+he had chastised was one of those who chose him.  All the rest obeyed:
+but he would not, till at last he got his due reward.  'If I deserve
+punishment for that,' says the boy, 'I am ready to submit.'
+
+The old king looks keenly and wonderingly at the young king, whose
+features seem somewhat like his own.  Likely enough in those days, when
+an Iranian noble or prince would have a quite different cast of
+complexion and of face from a Turanian herdsman.  A suspicion crosses
+him; and by threats of torture he gets the truth from the trembling
+herdsman.
+
+To the poor wretch's rapture the old king lets him go unharmed.  He has a
+more exquisite revenge to take, and sends for Harpagus, who likewise
+confesses the truth.  The wily old tyrant has naught but gentle words.
+It is best as it is.  He has been very sorry himself for the child, and
+Mandane's reproaches had gone to his heart.  'Let Harpagus go home and
+send his son to be a companion to the new-found prince.  To-night there
+will be great sacrifices in honour of the child's safety, and Harpagus is
+to be a guest at the banquet.'
+
+Harpagus comes; and after eating his fill, is asked how he likes the
+king's meat?  He gives the usual answer; and a covered basket is put
+before him, out of which he is to take--in Median fashion--what he likes.
+He finds in it the head and hands and feet of his own son.  Like a true
+Eastern he shows no signs of horror.  The king asks him if he knew what
+flesh he had been eating.  He answers that he knew perfectly.  That
+whatever the king did pleased him.
+
+Like an Eastern courtier, he knew how to dissemble, but not to forgive,
+and bided his time.  The Magi, to their credit, told Astyages that his
+dream had been fulfilled, that Cyrus--as we must now call the foundling
+prince--had fulfilled it by becoming a king in play, and the boy is let
+to go back to his father and his hardy Persian life.  But Harpagus does
+not leave him alone, nor perhaps, do his own thoughts.  He has wrongs to
+avenge on his grandfather.  And it seems not altogether impossible to the
+young mountaineer.
+
+He has seen enough of Median luxury to despise it and those who indulge
+in it.  He has seen his own grandfather with his cheeks rouged, his
+eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life, shut up from all
+his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio.
+
+He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes, an
+Armenian prince, a vassal of the Mede, who has his wrongs likewise to
+avenge.  And the two little armies of foot-soldiers--the Persians had no
+cavalry--defeat the innumerable horsemen of the Mede, take the old king,
+keep him in honourable captivity, and so change, one legend says, in a
+single battle, the fortunes of the whole East.
+
+And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly
+anything, save the fact that they were made.  The young mountaineer and
+his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward
+towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian
+cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been.  They gather to
+them, as a snow-ball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every tribe
+whom they overcome.  They knit these tribes to them in loyalty and
+affection by that righteousness--that truthfulness and justice--for which
+Isaiah in his grandest lyric strains has made them illustrious to all
+time; which Xenophon has celebrated in like manner in that exquisite book
+of his--the _Cyropaedia_.  The great Lydian kingdom of Croesus--Asia
+Minor as we call it now--goes down before them.  Babylon itself goes
+down, after that world-famed siege which ended in Belshazzar's feast; and
+when Cyrus died--still in the prime of life, the legends seem to say--he
+left a coherent and well-organised empire, which stretched from the
+Mediterranean to Hindostan.
+
+So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds probable and rational
+enough.  It may not do so to you; for it has not to many learned men.
+They are inclined to 'relegate it into the region of myth;' in plain
+English, to call old Herodotus a liar, or at least a dupe.  What means
+those wise men can have at this distance of more than 2000 years, of
+knowing more about the matter than Herodotus, who lived within 100 years
+of Cyrus, I for myself, cannot discover.  And I say this without the
+least wish to disparage these hypercritical persons.  For there are--and
+more there ought to be, as long as lies and superstitions remain on this
+earth--a class of thinkers who hold in just suspicion all stories which
+savour of the sensational, the romantic, even the dramatic.  They know
+the terrible uses to which appeals to the fancy and the emotions have
+been applied, and are still applied to enslave the intellects, the
+consciences, the very bodies of men and women.  They dread so much from
+experience the abuse of that formula, that a thing is so beautiful it
+must be true, that they are inclined to reply, 'Rather let us say boldly,
+it is so beautiful that it cannot be true.  Let us mistrust, or even
+refuse to believe _a priori_, and at first sight, all startling,
+sensational, even poetic tales, and accept nothing as history, which is
+not as dull as the ledger of a dry goods' store.'  But I think that
+experience, both in nature and in society, are against that ditch-water
+philosophy.  The weather, being governed by laws, ought always to be
+equable and normal, and yet you have whirlwinds, droughts, thunderstorms.
+The share-market, being governed by laws, ought to be always equable and
+normal, and yet you have startling transactions, startling panics,
+startling disclosures, and a whole sensational romance of commercial
+crime and folly.  Which of us has lived to be fifty years old, without
+having witnessed in private life sensation tragedies, alas! sometimes too
+fearful to be told, or at least sensational romances, which we shall take
+care not to tell, because we shall not be believed?  Let the ditch-water
+philosophy say what it will, human life is not a ditch, but a wild and
+roaring river, flooding its banks, and eating out new channels with many
+a landslip.  It is a strange world, and man, a strange animal, guided, it
+is true, usually by most commonplace motives; but, for that reason, ready
+and glad at times to escape from them and their dulness and baseness; to
+give vent, if but for a moment, in wild freedom, to that demoniac
+element, which, as Goethe says, underlies his nature and all nature; and
+to prefer for an hour, to the normal and respectable ditch-water, a
+bottle of champagne or even a carouse on fire-water, let the consequences
+be what they may.
+
+How else shall we explain such a phenomenon as those old crusades?  Were
+they undertaken for any purpose, commercial or other?  Certainly not for
+lightening an overburdened population.  Nay, is not the history of your
+own Mormons, and their exodus into the far West, one of the most
+startling instances which the world has seen for several centuries, of
+the unexpected and incalculable forces which lie hid in man?  Believe me,
+man's passions, heated to igniting point, rather than his prudence cooled
+down to freezing point, are the normal causes of all great human
+movement.  And a truer law of social science than any that political
+economists are wont to lay down, is that old 'Dov' e la Donna' of the
+Italian judge, who used to ask, as a preliminary to every case, civil or
+criminal, which was brought before him, 'Dov' e la Donna?'  'Where is the
+lady?' certain, like a wise old gentleman, that a woman was most probably
+at the bottom of the matter.
+
+Strangeness?  Romance?  Did any of you ever read--if you have not you
+should read--Archbishop Whately's _Historic Doubts about the Emperor
+Napoleon the First_?  Therein the learned and witty Archbishop proved, as
+early as 1819, by fair use of the criticism of Mr. Hume and the Sceptic
+School, that the whole history of the great Napoleon ought to be treated
+by wise men as a myth and a romance, that there is little or no evidence
+of his having existed at all; and that the story of his strange successes
+and strange defeats was probably invented by our Government in order to
+pander to the vanity of the English nation.
+
+I will say this, which Archbishop Whately, in a late edition,
+foreshadows, wittily enough--that if one or two thousand years hence,
+when the history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his rise and
+fall, shall come to be subjected to critical analysis by future
+Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be proved by
+them to be utterly mythical, incredible, monstrous--and that all the
+more, the more the actual facts remain to puzzle their unimaginative
+brains.  What will they make, two thousand years hence, of the landing at
+Boulogne with the tame eagle?  Will not that, and stranger facts still,
+but just as true, be relegated to the region of myth, with the dream of
+Astyages, and the young and princely herdsman playing at king over his
+fellow-slaves?
+
+But enough of this.  To me, these bits of romance often seem the truest,
+as well as the most important, portions of history.
+
+When old Herodotus tells me how, King Astyages having guarded the
+frontier, Harpagus sent a hunter to young Cyrus with a fresh-killed hare,
+telling him to open it in private; and how, sewn up in it was the letter,
+telling him that the time to rebel was come, I am inclined to say, That
+must be true.  So beneath the dignity of history, so quaint and
+unexpected, it is all the more likely _not_ to have been invented.
+
+So with that other story--How young Cyrus giving out that his grandfather
+had made him general of the Persians, summoned them all, each man with a
+sickle in his hand, into a prairie full of thorns, and bade them clear it
+in one day; and how when they, like loyal men, had finished, he bade them
+bathe, and next day he took them into a great meadow and feasted them
+with corn and wine, and all that his father's farm would yield, and asked
+them which day they liked best; and, when they answered as was to be
+expected, how he opened his parable and told them, 'Choose, then, to work
+for the Persians like slaves, or to be free with me.'
+
+Such a tale sounds to me true.  It has the very savour of the parables of
+the Old Testament; as have, surely, the dreams of the old Sultan, with
+which the tale begins.  Do they not put us in mind of the dreams of
+Nebuchadnezzar, in the Book of Daniel?
+
+Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are very likely to be
+true.  Understand me, I only say likely; the ditch-water view of history
+is not all wrong.  Its advocates are right in saying great historic
+changes are not produced simply by one great person, by one remarkable
+event.  They have been preparing, perhaps, for centuries.  They are the
+result of numberless forces, acting according to laws, which might have
+been foreseen, and will be foreseen, when the science of History is more
+perfectly understood.
+
+For instance, Cyrus could not have conquered the Median Empire at a
+single blow, if first that empire had not been utterly rotten; and next,
+if he and his handful of Persians had not been tempered and sharpened, by
+long hardihood, to the finest cutting edge.
+
+Yes, there were all the materials for the catastrophe--the cannon, the
+powder, the shot.  But to say that the Persians must have conquered the
+Medes, even if Cyrus had never lived, is to say, as too many philosophers
+seem to me to say, that, given cannon, powder, and shot, it will fire
+itself off some day if we only leave it alone long enough.
+
+It may be so.  But our usual experience of Nature and Fact is, that
+spontaneous combustion is a rare and exceptional phenomenon; that if a
+cannon is to be fired, someone must arise and pull the trigger.  And I
+believe that in Society and Politics, when a great event is ready to be
+done, someone must come and do it--do it, perhaps, half unwittingly, by
+some single rash act--like that first fatal shot fired at Fort
+Sumter--which makes, as by an electric spark, a whole nation flash into
+enduring flame.
+
+But to return to Cyrus and his Persians.
+
+I know not whether the _Cyropaedia_ is much read in your schools and
+universities.  But it is one of the books which I should like to see,
+either in a translation or its own exquisite Greek, in the hands of every
+young man.  It is not all fact.  It is but a historic romance.  But it is
+better than history.  It is an ideal book, like Sidney's _Arcadia_ or
+Spenser's _Fairy Queen_--the ideal self-education of an ideal hero.  And
+the moral of the book--ponder it well, all young men who have the chance
+or the hope of exercising authority among your fellow-men, the noble and
+most Christian moral of that heathen book is this: that the path to solid
+and beneficent influence over our fellow-men lies, not through brute
+force, not through cupidity, but through the highest morality; through
+justice, truthfulness, humanity, self-denial, modesty, courtesy, and all
+which makes man or woman lovely in the eyes of mortals or of God.
+
+Yes, the _Cyropaedia_ is a noble book, about a noble personage.  But I
+cannot forget that there are nobler words by far concerning that same
+noble personage, in the magnificent series of Hebrew Lyrics, which
+begins, 'Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith the Lord'--in which the
+inspired poet, watching the rise of Cyrus and his Puritans, and the fall
+of Babylon, and the idolatries of the East, and the coming deliverance of
+his own countrymen, speaks of the Persian hero in words so grand that
+they have been often enough applied, and with all fitness, to one greater
+than Cyrus, and than all men:--
+
+    Who raised up the righteous man from the East,
+    And called him to attend his steps?
+    Who subdued nations at his presence,
+    And gave him dominion over kings?
+    And made them like the dust before his sword,
+    And the driven stubble before his bow?
+    He pursueth them, he passeth in safety,
+    By a way never trodden before by his feet.
+    Who hath performed and made these things,
+    Calling the generations from the beginning?
+    I, Jehovah, the first and the last, I am the same.
+
+    Behold my servant, whom I will uphold;
+    My chosen, in whom my soul delighteth;
+    I will make my spirit rest upon him,
+    And he shall publish judgment to the nations.
+    He shall not cry aloud, nor clamour,
+    Nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets.
+    The bruised reed he shall not break,
+    And the smoking flax he shall not quench.
+    He shall publish justice, and establish it.
+    His force shall not be abated, nor broken,
+    Until he has firmly seated justice in the earth,
+    And the distant nations shall wait for his Law.
+    Thus saith the God, even Jehovah,
+    Who created the heavens, and stretched them out;
+    Who spread abroad the earth, and its produce,
+    I, Jehovah, have called thee for a righteous end,
+    And I will take hold of thy hand, and preserve thee,
+    And I will give thee for a covenant to the people,
+    And for a light to the nations;
+    To open the eyes of the blind,
+    To bring the captives out of prison,
+    And from the dungeon those who dwell in darkness.
+    I am Jehovah--that is my name;
+    And my glory will I not give to another,
+    Nor my praise to the graven idols.
+
+    Who saith to Cyrus--Thou art my shepherd,
+    And he shall fulfil all my pleasure:
+    Who saith to Jerusalem--Thou shalt be built;
+    And to the Temple--Thou shalt be founded.
+    Thus saith Jehovah to his anointed,
+    To Cyrus whom I hold fast by his right hand,
+    That I may subdue nations under him,
+    And loose the loins of kings;
+    That I may open before him the two-leaved doors,
+    And the gates shall not be shut;
+    I will go before thee
+    And bring the mountains low.
+    The gates of brass will I break in sunder,
+    And the bars of iron hew down.
+    And I will give thee the treasures of darkness,
+    And the hoards hid deep in secret places,
+    That thou mayest know that I am Jehovah.
+    I have surnamed thee, though thou knowest not me.
+    I am Jehovah and none else:
+    Beside me there is no God.
+    I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me,
+    That they may know from the rising of the sun,
+    And from the west, that there is none beside me;
+    I am Jehovah, and none else;
+    Forming light, and creating darkness;
+    Forming peace, and creating evil.
+    I, Jehovah, make all these.
+
+This is the Hebrew prophet's conception of the great Puritan of the Old
+World who went forth with such a commission as this, to destroy the idols
+of the East, while
+
+    The isles saw that, and feared,
+    And the ends of the earth were afraid;
+    They drew near, they came together;
+    Everyone helped his neighbour,
+    And said to his brother, Be of good courage.
+
+    The carver encouraged the smith,
+    He that smoothed with the hammer
+    Him that smote on the anvil;
+    Saying of the solder, It is good;
+    And fixing the idol with nails, lest it be moved;
+
+But all in vain; for as the poet goes on--
+
+    Bel bowed down, and Nebo stooped;
+    Their idols were upon the cattle,
+    A burden to the weary beast.
+    They stoop, they bow down together;
+    They could not deliver their own charge;
+    Themselves are gone into captivity.
+
+And what, to return, what was the end of the great Cyrus and of his
+empire?
+
+Alas, alas! as with all human glory, the end was not as the beginning.
+
+We are scarce bound to believe positively the story how Cyrus made one
+war too many, and was cut off in the Scythian deserts, falling before the
+arrows of mere savages; and how their queen, Tomyris, poured blood down
+the throat of the dead corpse, with the words, 'Glut thyself with the
+gore for which thou hast thirsted.'  But it may be true--for Xenophon
+states it expressly, and with detail--that Cyrus, from the very time of
+his triumph, became an Eastern despot, a sultan or a shah, living apart
+from his people in mysterious splendour, in the vast fortified palace
+which he built for himself; and imitating and causing his nobles and
+satraps to imitate, in all but vice and effeminacy, the very Medes whom
+he had conquered.  And of this there is no doubt--that his sons and their
+empire ran rapidly through that same vicious circle of corruption to
+which all despotisms are doomed, and became within 250 years, even as the
+Medes, the Chaldeans, the Lydians, whom they had conquered, children no
+longer of Ahura Mazda, but of Ahriman, of darkness and not of light, to
+be conquered by Alexander and his Greeks even more rapidly and more
+shamefully than they had conquered the East.
+
+This is the short epic of the Persian Empire, ending alas! as all human
+epics are wont to end, sadly, if not shamefully.
+
+But let me ask you, Did I say too much, when I said, that to these
+Persians we owe that we are here to-night?
+
+I do not say that without them we should not have been here.  God, I
+presume, when He is minded to do anything has more than one way of doing
+it.
+
+But that we are to-night the last link in a chain of causes and effects
+which reaches as far back as the emigration of the Persians southward
+from the plateau of Pamir, we cannot doubt.
+
+For see.  By the fall of Babylon and its empire the Jews were freed from
+their captivity--large numbers of them at least--and sent home to their
+own Jerusalem.  What motives prompted Cyrus, and Darius after him, to do
+that deed?
+
+Those who like to impute the lowest motives may say if they will, that
+Daniel and the later Isaiah found it politic to worship the rising sun,
+and flatter the Persian conquerors: and that Cyrus and Darius in turn
+were glad to see Jerusalem rebuilt, as an impregnable frontier fortress
+between them and Egypt.  Be it so; I, who wish to talk of things noble,
+pure, lovely and of good report, would rather point you once more to the
+magnificent poetry of the later Isaiah which commences at the 40th
+chapter of the Book of Isaiah, and say--There, upon the very face of the
+document, stands written the fact that the sympathy between the faithful
+Persian and the faithful Jew--the two Puritans of the Old World, the two
+haters of lies, idolatries, superstitions--was actually as intense as it
+ought to have been, as it must have been.
+
+Be that as it may, the return of the Jews to Jerusalem preserved for us
+the Old Testament, while it restored to them a national centre, a sacred
+city, like that of Delphi to the Greeks, Rome to the Romans, Mecca to the
+Muslim, loyalty to which prevented their being utterly absorbed by the
+more civilised Eastern races among whom they had been scattered abroad as
+colonies of captives.
+
+Then another, and a seemingly needful link of cause and effect ensued:
+Alexander of Macedon destroyed the Persian Empire, and the East became
+Greek, and Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, became the head-quarters of
+Jewish learning.  But for that very cause, the Scriptures were not left
+inaccessible to the mass of mankind, like the old Pehlevi liturgies of
+the Zend-avesta, or the old Sanscrit Vedas, in an obsolete and hieratic
+tongue, but were translated into, and continued in, the then all but
+world-wide Hellenic speech, which was to the ancient world what French is
+to the modern.
+
+Then the East became Roman, without losing its Greek speech.  And under
+the wide domination of that later Roman Empire--which had subdued and
+organised the whole known world, save the Parthian descendants of those
+old Persians, and our old Teutonic forefathers, in their German forests
+and on their Scandinavian shores--that Divine book was carried far and
+wide, East and West, and South, from the heart of Abyssinia to the
+mountains of Armenia, and to the isles of the ocean, beyond Britain
+itself to Ireland and to the Hebrides.
+
+And that book--so strangely coinciding with the old creed of the earlier
+Persians--that book, long misunderstood, long overlain by the dust, and
+overgrown by the parasitic fungi of centuries, that book it was which
+sent to these trans-Atlantic shores the founders of your great nation.
+That book gave them their instinct of freedom, tempered by reverence for
+Law.  That book gave them their hatred of idolatry; and made them not
+only say but act upon their own words, with these old Persians and with
+the Jewish prophets alike, Sacrifice and burnt-offering thou wouldst not;
+then said we, Lo, we come.  In the volume of the book it is written of
+us, that we come to do thy will, O God.  Yes, long and fantastic is the
+chain of causes and effects, which links you here to the old heroes who
+came down from Central Asia, because the land had grown so wondrous cold,
+that there were ten months of winter to two of summer; and when simply
+after warmth and life, and food for them and for their flocks, they
+wandered forth to found and help to found a spiritual kingdom.
+
+And even in their migration, far back in these dim and mystic ages, have
+we found the earliest link of the long chain?  Not so.  What if the
+legend of the change of climate be the dim recollection of an enormous
+physical fact?  What if it, and the gradual depopulation of the whole
+north of Asia be owing, as geologists now suspect, to the slow and
+age-long uprise of the whole of Siberia, thrusting the warm Arctic sea
+further and further to the northward, and placing between it and the
+Highlands of Thibet an ever-increasing breadth of icy land, destroying
+animals, and driving whole races southward, in search of the summer and
+the sun?
+
+What if the first link in the chain, as yet conceivable by man, should be
+the cosmic changes in the distribution of land and water, which filled
+the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly mammoth
+and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of other revolutions,
+reaching back and back, and on and on, into the infinite unknown.  Why
+not?  For so are all human destinies
+
+    Bound with gold chains unto the throne of God.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE V.
+ANCIENT CIVILISATION.
+
+
+There is a theory abroad in the world just now about the origin of the
+human race, which has so many patent and powerful physiological facts to
+support it that we must not lightly say that it is absurd or impossible;
+and that is, that man's mortal body and brain were derived from some
+animal and ape-like creature.  Of that I am not going to speak now.  My
+subject is--How this creature called man, from whatever source derived,
+became civilised, rational, and moral.  And I am sorry to say there is
+tacked on by many to the first theory, another which does not follow from
+it, and which has really nothing to do with it, and it is this--that man,
+with all his wonderful and mysterious aspirations, always unfulfilled yet
+always precious, at once his torment and his joy, his very hope of
+everlasting life--that man, I say, developed himself, unassisted, out of
+a state of primaeval brutishness, simply by calculations of pleasure and
+pain, by observing what actions would pay in the long run and what would
+not; and so learnt to conquer his selfishness by a more refined and
+extended selfishness, and exchanged his brutality for worldliness, and
+then, in a few instances, his worldliness for next-worldliness.  I hope I
+need not say that I do not believe this theory.  If I did, I could not be
+a Christian, I think, nor a philosopher either.  At least, if I thought
+that human civilisation had sprung from such a dunghill as that, I
+should, in honour to my race, say nothing about it, here or elsewhere.
+
+Why talk of the shame of our ancestors?  I want to talk of their honour
+and glory.  I want to talk, if I talk at all, about great times, about
+noble epochs, noble movements, noble deeds, and noble folk; about times
+in which the human race--it may be through many mistakes, alas! and sin,
+and sorrow and bloodshed--struggled up one step higher on those great
+stairs which, as we hope, lead upward towards the far-off city of God;
+the perfect polity, the perfect civilisation, the perfect religion, which
+is eternal in the heavens.
+
+Of great men, then, and noble deeds I want to speak.  I am bound to do so
+first, in courtesy to my hearers.  For in choosing such a subject I took
+for granted a nobleness and greatness of mind in them which can
+appreciate and enjoy the contemplation of that which is lofty and heroic,
+and that which is useful indeed, though not to the purses merely or the
+mouths of men, but to their intellects and spirits; that highest
+philosophy which, though she can (as has been sneeringly said of her)
+bake no bread, can at least do this--and she alone--make men worthy to
+eat the bread which God has given them.
+
+I am bound to speak on such subjects, because I have never yet met, or
+read of, the human company who did not require, now and then at least,
+being reminded of such times and such personages--of whatsoever things
+are just, pure, true, lovely, and of good report, if there be any manhood
+and any praise to think, as St. Paul bids us all, of such things, that we
+may keep up in our minds as much as possible a lofty standard, a pure
+ideal, instead of sinking to the mere selfish standard which judges all
+things, even those of the world to come, by profit and by loss, and into
+that sordid frame of mind in which a man grows to believe that the world
+is constructed of bricks and timber, and kept going by the price of
+stocks.
+
+We are all tempted, and the easier and more prosperous we are, the more
+we are tempted, to fall into that sordid and shallow frame of mind.
+Sordid even when its projects are most daring, its outward luxuries most
+refined; and shallow, even when most acute, when priding itself most on
+its knowledge of human nature, and of the secret springs which, so it
+dreams, move the actions and make the history of nations and of men.  All
+are tempted that way, even the noblest-hearted.  _Adhaesit pavimento
+venter_, says the old psalmist.  I am growing like the snake, crawling in
+the dust, and eating the dust in which I crawl.  I try to lift up my eyes
+to the heavens, to the true, the beautiful, the good, the eternal
+nobleness which was before all time, and shall be still when time has
+past away.  But to lift up myself is what I cannot do.  Who will help me?
+Who will quicken me? as our old English tongue has it.  Who will give me
+life?  The true, pure, lofty human life which I did _not_ inherit from
+the primaeval ape, which the ape-nature in me is for ever trying to
+stifle, and make me that which I know too well I could so easily
+become--a cunninger and more dainty-featured brute?  Death itself, which
+seems at times so fair, is fair because even it may raise me up and
+deliver me from the burden of this animal and mortal body--
+
+    'Tis life, not death, for which I pant;
+    'Tis life, whereof my nerves are scant;
+    More life, and fuller, that I want.
+
+Man?  I am a man not by reason of my bones and muscles, nerves and brain,
+which I have in common with apes and dogs and horses.  I am a man--thou
+art a man or woman--not because we have a flesh--God forbid! but because
+there is a spirit in us, a divine spark and ray, which nature did not
+give, and which nature cannot take away.  And therefore, while I live on
+earth, I will live to the spirit, not to the flesh, that I may be,
+indeed, a _man_; and this same gross flesh, this animal ape-nature in me,
+shall be the very element in me which I will renounce, defy, despise; at
+least, if I am minded to be, not a merely higher savage, but a truly
+higher civilised man.  Civilisation with me shall mean, not more wealth,
+more finery, more self-indulgence--even more aesthetic and artistic
+luxury; but more virtue, more knowledge, more self-control, even though I
+earn scanty bread by heavy toil; and when I compare the Caesar of Rome or
+the great king, whether of Egypt, Babylon, or Persia, with the hermit of
+the _Thebaid_, starving in his frock of camel's hair, with his soul fixed
+on the ineffable glories of the unseen, and striving, however wildly and
+fantastically, to become an angel and not an ape, I will say the hermit,
+and not the Caesar, is the civilised man.
+
+There are plenty of histories of civilisation and theories of
+civilisation abroad in the world just now, and which profess to show you
+how the primaeval savage has, or at least may have, become the civilised
+man.  For my part, with all due and careful consideration, I confess I
+attach very little value to any of them: and for this simple reason that
+we have no facts.  The facts are lost.
+
+Of course, if you assume a proposition as certainly true, it is easy
+enough to prove that proposition to be true, at least to your own
+satisfaction.  If you assert with the old proverb, that you may make a
+silk purse out of a sow's ear, you will be stupider than I dare suppose
+anyone here to be, if you cannot invent for yourselves all the
+intermediate stages of the transformation, however startling.  And,
+indeed, if modern philosophers had stuck more closely to this old
+proverb, and its defining verb 'make,' and tried to show how some person
+or persons--let them be who they may--men, angels, or gods--made the
+sow's ear into the silk purse, and the savage into the sage--they might
+have pleaded that they were still trying to keep their feet upon the firm
+ground of actual experience.  But while their theory is, that the sow's
+ear grew into a silk purse of itself, and yet unconsciously and without
+any intention of so bettering itself in life; why, I think that those who
+have studied the history which lies behind them, and the poor human
+nature which is struggling, and sinning, and sorrowing and failing around
+them, and which seems on the greater part of this planet going downwards
+and not upwards, and by no means bettering itself, save in the increase
+of opera-houses, liquor-bars, and gambling-tables, and that which
+pertaineth thereto; then we, I think, may be excused if we say with the
+old Stoics--[Greek text]--I withhold my judgment.  I know nothing about
+the matter yet; and you, O my imaginative, though learned friends, know I
+suspect very little either.
+
+    Eldest of things, Divine Equality:
+
+so sang poor Shelley, and with a certain truth.  For, if, as I believe,
+the human race sprang from a single pair, there must have been among
+their individual descendants an equality far greater than any which has
+been known on earth during historic times.  But that equality was at
+best, the infantile innocence of the primary race, which faded away in
+the race as quickly, alas! as it does in the individual child.
+Divine--therefore it was one of the first blessings which man lost; one
+of the last, I fear, to which he will return; that to which civilisation,
+even at its best yet known, has not yet attained, save here and there for
+short periods; but towards which it is striving as an ideal goal, and, as
+I trust, not in vain.
+
+The eldest of things which we see actually as history, is not equality,
+but an already developed hideous inequality, trying to perpetuate itself,
+and yet by a most divine and gracious law, destroying itself by the very
+means which it uses to keep itself alive.
+
+'There were giants in the earth in those days, And Nimrod began to be a
+mighty one in the earth'--
+
+    A mighty hunter; and his game was man.
+
+No; it is not equality which we see through the dim mists of bygone ages.
+
+What we do see, is--I know not whether you will think me superstitious or
+old-fashioned, but so I hold--very much what the earlier books of the
+Bible show us under symbolic laws.  Greek histories, Roman histories,
+Egyptian histories, Eastern histories, inscriptions, national epics,
+legends, fragments of legends--in the New World as in the Old--all tell
+the same story.  Not the story without an end, but the story without a
+beginning.  As in the Hindoo cosmogony, the world stands on an elephant,
+and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on--what?  No man knows.
+I do not know.  I only assert deliberately; waiting, as Napoleon says,
+till the world come round to me, that the tortoise does not stand--as is
+held by certain anthropologists, some honoured by me, some personally
+dear to me--upon the savages who chipped flints and fed on mammoth and
+reindeer in North-western Europe, shortly after the age of ice, a few
+hundred thousand years ago.  These sturdy little fellows--the kinsmen
+probably of the Esquimaux and Lapps--could have been but the
+avant-couriers, or more probably the fugitives from the true mass of
+mankind--spreading northward from the Tropics, into climes becoming,
+after the long catastrophe of the age of ice, once more genial enough to
+support men who knew what decent comfort was, and were strong enough to
+get the same, by all means fair or foul.  No.  The tortoise of the human
+race does not stand on a savage.  The savage may stand on an ape-like
+creature.  I do not say that he does not.  I do not say that he does.  I
+do not know; and no man knows.  But at least I say that the civilised man
+and his world stand not upon creatures like to any savage now known upon
+the earth.  For first, it seems to be most unlikely; and next, and more
+important to an inductive philosopher, there is no proof of it.  I see no
+savages becoming really civilised men--that is--not merely men who will
+ape the outside of our so-called civilisation, even absorb a few of our
+ideas; not merely that; but truly civilised men who will think for
+themselves, invent for themselves, act for themselves; and when the
+sacred lamp of light and truth has been passed into their hands, carry it
+on unextinguished, and transmit it to their successors without running
+back every moment to get it relighted by those from whom they received
+it: and who are bound--remember that--patiently and lovingly to relight
+it for them; to give freely to all their fellow-men of that which God has
+given to them and to their ancestors; and let God, not man, be judge of
+how much the Red Indian or the Polynesian, the Caffre or the Chinese, is
+capable of receiving and of using.
+
+Moreover, in history there is no record, absolutely no record, as far as
+I am aware, of any savage tribe civilising itself.  It is a bold saying.
+I stand by my assertion: most happy to find myself confuted, even in a
+single instance; for my being wrong would give me, what I can have no
+objection to possess, a higher opinion than I have now, of the unassisted
+capabilities of my fellow-men.
+
+But civilisation must have begun somewhen, somewhere, with some person,
+or some family, or some nation; and how did it begin?
+
+I have said already that I do not know.  But I have had my dream--like
+the philosopher--and as I have not been ashamed to tell it elsewhere, I
+shall not be ashamed to tell it here.  And it is this:--
+
+What if the beginnings of true civilisation in this unique, abnormal,
+diseased, unsatisfied, incomprehensible, and truly miraculous and
+supernatural race we call man, had been literally, and in actual fact,
+miraculous and supernatural likewise?  What if that be the true key to
+the mystery of humanity and its origin?  What if the few first chapters
+of the most ancient and most sacred book should point, under whatever
+symbols, to the actual and the only possible origin of civilisation, the
+education of a man, or a family by beings of some higher race than man?
+What if the old Puritan doctrine of Election should be even of a deeper
+and wider application than divines have been wont to think?  What if
+individuals, if peoples, have been chosen out from time to time for a
+special illumination, that they might be the lights of the earth, and the
+salt of the world?  What if they have, each in their turn, abused that
+divine teaching to make themselves the tyrants, instead of the ministers,
+of the less enlightened?  To increase the inequalities of nature by their
+own selfishness, instead of decreasing them, into the equality of grace,
+by their own self-sacrifice?  What if the Bible after all was right, and
+even more right than we were taught to think?
+
+So runs my dream.  If, after I have confessed to it, you think me still
+worth listening to, in this enlightened 19th century, I will go on.
+
+At all events, what we see at the beginning of all known and half-known
+history, is not savagery, but high civilisation, at least of an outward
+and material kind.  Do you demur?  Then recollect, I pray you, that the
+three oldest peoples known to history on this planet are Egypt, China,
+Hindostan.  The first glimpses of the world are always like those which
+the book of Genesis gives us; like those which your own continent gives
+us.  As it was 400 years ago in America, so it was in North Africa and in
+Asia 4,000 years ago, or 40,000 for aught I know.  Nay, if anyone should
+ask--And why not 400,000 years ago, on Miocene continents long sunk
+beneath the Tropic sea?  I for one have no rejoinder save--We have no
+proofs as yet.
+
+There loom up, out of the darkness of legend, into the as yet dim dawn of
+history, what the old Arabs call Races of pre-Adamite Sultans--colossal
+monarchies, with fixed and often elaborate laws, customs, creeds; with
+aristocracies, priesthoods--seemingly always of a superior and conquering
+race; with a mass of common folk, whether free or half-free, composed of
+older conquered races; of imported slaves, too, and their descendants.
+
+But whence comes the royal race, the aristocracy, the priesthood?  You
+enquire, and you find that they usually know not themselves.  They are
+usually--I had almost dared to say, always--foreigners.  They have
+crossed the neighbouring mountains.  They have come by sea, like Dido to
+Carthage, like Manco Cassae and Mama Bello to America, and they have
+sometimes forgotten when.  At least they are wiser, stronger, fairer,
+than the aborigines.  They are to them--as Jacques Cartier was to the
+Indians of Canada--as gods.  They are not sure that they are not
+descended from gods.  They are the Children of the Sun, or what not.  The
+children of light, who ray out such light as they have, upon the darkness
+of their subjects.  They are at first, probably, civilisers, not
+conquerors.  For, if tradition is worth anything--and we have nothing
+else to go upon--they are at first few in number.  They come as settlers,
+or even as single sages.  It is, in all tradition, not the many who
+influence the few, but the few who influence the many.
+
+So aristocracies, in the true sense, are formed.  But the higher calling
+is soon forgotten.  The purer light is soon darkened in pride and
+selfishness, luxury and lust; as in Genesis, the sons of God see the
+daughters of men, that they are fair; and they take them wives of all
+that they choose.  And so a mixed race springs up and increases, without
+detriment at first to the commonwealth.  For, by a well-known law of
+heredity, the cross between two races, probably far apart, produces at
+first a progeny possessing the forces, and, alas! probably the vices of
+both.  And when the sons of God go in to the daughters of men, there are
+giants in the earth in those days, men of renown.  The Roman empire,
+remember, was never stronger than when the old Patrician blood had
+mingled itself with that of every nation round the Mediterranean.
+
+But it does not last.  Selfishness, luxury, ferocity, spread from above,
+as well as from below.  The just aristocracy of virtue and wisdom becomes
+an unjust one of mere power and privilege; that again, one of mere
+wealth, corrupting and corrupt; and is destroyed, not by the people from
+below, but by the monarch from above.  The hereditary bondsmen may know
+
+    Who would be free,
+    Himself must strike the blow.
+
+But they dare not, know not how.  The king must do it for them.  He must
+become the State.  'Better one tyrant,' as Voltaire said, 'than many.'
+Better stand in fear of one lion far away, than of many wolves, each in
+the nearest wood.  And so arise those truly monstrous Eastern despotisms,
+of which modern Persia is, thank God, the only remaining specimen; for
+Turkey and Egypt are too amenable of late years to the influence of the
+free nations to be counted as despotisms pure and simple--despotisms in
+which men, instead of worshipping a God-man, worship the hideous
+counterfeit, a _Man-god_--a poor human being endowed by public opinion
+with the powers of deity, while he is the slave of all the weaknesses of
+humanity.  But such, as an historic fact, has been the last stage of
+every civilisation--even that of Rome, which ripened itself upon this
+earth the last in ancient times, and, I had almost said, until this very
+day, except among the men who speak Teutonic tongues, and who have
+preserved through all temptations, and reasserted through all dangers,
+the free ideas which have been our sacred heritage ever since Tacitus
+beheld us, with respect and awe, among our German forests, and saw in us
+the future masters of the Roman Empire.
+
+Yes, it is very sad, the past history of mankind.  But shall we despise
+those who went before us, and on whose accumulated labours we now stand?
+
+Shall we not reverence our spiritual ancestors?  Shall we not show our
+reverence by copying them, at least whenever, as in those old Persians,
+we see in them manliness and truthfulness, hatred of idolatries, and
+devotion to the God of light and life and good?  And shall we not feel
+pity, instead of contempt, for their ruder forms of government, their
+ignorances, excesses, failures--so excusable in men who, with little or
+no previous teaching, were trying to solve for themselves for the first
+time the deepest social and political problems of humanity.
+
+Yes, those old despotisms, we trust, are dead and never to revive.  But
+their corpses are the corpses, not of our enemies, but of our friends and
+predecessors, slain in the world-old fight of Ormuzd against
+Ahriman--light against darkness, order against disorder.  Confusedly they
+fought, and sometimes ill: but their corpses piled the breach and filled
+the trench for us, and over their corpses we step on to what should be to
+us an easy victory--what may be to us, yet, a shameful ruin.
+
+For if we be, as we are wont to boast, the salt of the earth and the
+light of the world, what if the salt should lose its savour?  What if the
+light which is in us should become darkness?  For myself, when I look
+upon the responsibilities of the free nations of modern times, so far
+from boasting of that liberty in which I delight--and to keep which I
+freely, too, could die--I rather say, in fear and trembling, God help us
+on whom He has laid so heavy a burden as to make us free; responsible,
+each individual of us, not only to ourselves, but to Him and all mankind.
+For if we fall we shall fall I know not whither, and I dare not think.
+
+How those old despotisms, the mighty empires of old time, fell, we know,
+and we can easily explain.  Corrupt, luxurious, effeminate, eaten out by
+universal selfishness and mutual fear, they had at last no organic
+coherence.  The moral anarchy within showed through, at last burst
+through, the painted skin of prescriptive order which held them together.
+Some braver and abler, and usually more virtuous people, often some
+little, hardy, homely mountain tribe, saw that the fruit was ripe for
+gathering; and, caring nought for superior numbers--and saying with
+German Alaric when the Romans boasted of their numbers, 'The thicker the
+hay the easier it is mowed--struck one brave blow at the huge inflated
+wind-bag--as Cyrus and his handful of Persians struck at the Medes; as
+Alexander and his handful of Greeks struck afterwards at the
+Persians--and behold, it collapsed upon the spot.  And then the victors
+took the place of the conquered; and became in their turn an aristocracy,
+and then a despotism; and in their turn rotted down and perished.  And so
+the vicious circle repeated itself, age after age, from Egypt and Assyria
+to Mexico and Peru.
+
+And therefore, we, free peoples as we are, have need to watch, and
+sternly watch, ourselves.  Equality of some kind or other is, as I said,
+our natural and seemingly inevitable goal.  But which equality?  For
+there are two--a true one and a false; a noble and a base; a healthful
+and a ruinous.  There is the truly divine equality, and there is the
+brute equality of sheep and oxen, and of flies and worms.  There is the
+equality which is founded on mutual envy.  The equality which respects
+others, and the equality which asserts itself.  The equality which longs
+to raise all alike, and the equality which desires to pull down all
+alike.  The equality which says--Thou art as good as I, and it may be
+better too, in the sight of God.  And the equality which says--I am as
+good as thou, and will therefore see if I cannot master thee.
+
+Side by side, in the heart of every free man, and every free people, are
+the two instincts struggling for the mastery, called by the same name,
+but bearing the same relation to each other as Marsyas to Apollo, the
+Satyr to the God.  Marsyas and Apollo, the base and the noble, are, as in
+the old Greek legend, contending for the prize.  And the prize is no less
+an one than all free people of this planet.
+
+In proportion as that nobler idea conquers, and men unite in the equality
+of mutual respect and mutual service, they move one step further towards
+realising on earth that Kingdom of God of which it is written--'The
+despots of the nations exercise dominion over them, and they that
+exercise authority over them are called benefactors.  But he that will be
+great among you let him be the servant of all.'
+
+And in proportion as that base idea conquers, and selfishness, not
+self-sacrifice, is the ruling spirit of a State, men move on, one step
+forward towards realising that kingdom of the devil upon earth, 'Every
+man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.'  Only, alas! in that
+evil equality of envy and hate, there is no hindmost, and the devil takes
+them all alike.
+
+And so is a period of discontent, revolution, internecine anarchy,
+followed by a tyranny endured, as in old Rome, by men once free, because
+tyranny will at least do for them, what they were too lazy and greedy and
+envious to do for themselves.
+
+    And all because they have forgot
+    What 'tis to be a man--to curb and spurn
+    The tyrant in us: the ignobler self
+    Which boasts, not loathes, its likeness to the brute;
+    And owns no good save ease, no ill save pain,
+    No purpose, save its share in that wild war
+    In which, through countless ages, living things
+    Compete in internecine greed.  Ah, loving God,
+    Are we as creeping things, which have no lord?
+    That we are brutes, great God, we know too well;
+    Apes daintier-featured; silly birds, who flaunt
+    Their plumes, unheeding of the fowler's step;
+    Spiders, who catch with paper, not with webs;
+    Tigers, who slay with cannon and sharp steel,
+    Instead of teeth and claws:--all these we are.
+    Are we no more than these, save in degree?
+    Mere fools of nature, puppets of strong lusts,
+    Taking the sword, to perish by the sword
+    Upon the universal battle-field,
+    Even as the things upon the moor outside?
+
+       The heath eats up green grass and delicate herbs;
+    The pines eat up the heath; the grub the pine;
+    The finch the grub; the hawk the silly finch;
+    And man, the mightiest of all beasts of prey,
+    Eats what he lists.  The strong eat up the weak;
+    The many eat the few; great nations, small;
+    And he who cometh in the name of all
+    Shall, greediest, triumph by the greed of all,
+    And, armed by his own victims, eat up all.
+    While ever out of the eternal heavens
+    Looks patient down the great magnanimous God,
+    Who, Master of all worlds, did sacrifice
+    All to Himself?  Nay: but Himself to all;
+    Who taught mankind, on that first Christmas Day,
+    What 'tis to be a man--to give, not take;
+    To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour;
+    To lift, not crush; if need, to die, not live.
+
+'He that cometh in the name of all'--the popular military despot--the
+'saviour of his country'--he is our internecine enemy on both sides of
+the Atlantic, whenever he arises--the inaugurator of that Imperialism,
+that Caesarism into which Rome sank, when not her liberties merely, but
+her virtues, were decaying out of her--the sink into which all wicked
+States, whether republics or monarchies, are sure to fall, simply because
+men must eat and drink for to-morrow they die.  The Military and
+Bureaucratic Despotism which keeps the many quiet, as in old Rome, by
+_panem et Circenses_--bread and games--or if need be, Pilgrimages; that
+the few may make money, eat, drink, and be merry, as long as it can last.
+That, let it ape as it may--as did the Caesars of old Rome at first--as
+another Emperor did even in our own days--the forms of dead freedom,
+really upholds an artificial luxury by brute force; and consecrates the
+basest of all aristocracies, the aristocracy of the money bag, by the
+divine sanction of the bayonet.
+
+That at all risks, even at the price of precious blood, the free peoples
+of the earth must ward off from them; for, makeshift and stop-gap as it
+is, it does not even succeed in what it tries to do.  It does not last.
+Have we not seen that it does not, cannot last?  How can it last.  This
+falsehood, like all falsehoods, must collapse at one touch of Ithuriel's
+spear of truth and fact.  And--
+
+'Then saw I the end of these men.  Namely, how Thou dost set them in
+slippery places, and casteth them down.
+
+'Suddenly do they perish, and come to a fearful end.  Yea, like as a
+dream when one awaketh, so shalt Thou make their image to vanish out of
+the city.'
+
+Have we not seen that too, though, thank God, neither in England nor in
+the United States?
+
+And then?  What then?  None knows, and none can know.
+
+The future of France and Spain, the future of the Tropical Republics of
+Spanish America, is utterly blank and dark; not to be prophesied, I hold,
+by mortal man, simply because we have no like cases in the history of the
+past whereby to judge the tendencies of the present.  Will they revive?
+Under the genial influences of free institutions will the good seed which
+is in them take root downwards, and bear fruit upwards? and make them all
+what that fair France has been, in spite of all her faults, so often in
+past years--a joy and an inspiration to all the nations round?  Shall it
+be thus?  God grant it may; but He, and He alone, can tell.  We only
+stand by, watching, if we be wise, with pity and with fear, the working
+out of a tremendous new social problem, which must affect the future of
+the whole civilised world.
+
+For if the agonising old nations fail to regenerate themselves, what can
+befall?  What, when even Imperialism has been tried and failed, as fail
+it must?  What but that lower depth within the lowest deep?
+
+             That last dread mood
+    Of sated lust, and dull decrepitude.
+    No law, no art, no faith, no hope, no God.
+    When round the freezing founts of life in peevish ring,
+    Crouched on the bare-worn sod,
+    Babbling about the unreturning spring,
+    And whining for dead creeds, which cannot save,
+    The toothless nations shiver to their grave.
+
+And we, who think we stand, let us take heed lest we fall.  Let us
+accept, in modesty and in awe, the responsibility of our freedom, and
+remember that that freedom can be preserved only in one old-fashioned
+way.  Let us remember that the one condition of a true democracy is the
+same as the one condition of a true aristocracy, namely, virtue.  Let us
+teach our children, as grand old Lilly taught our forefathers 300 years
+ago--'It is virtue, gentlemen, yea, virtue that maketh gentlemen; that
+maketh the poor rich, the subject a king, the lowborn noble, the deformed
+beautiful.  These things neither the whirling wheel of fortune can
+overturn, nor the deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither
+sickness abate, nor age abolish.'
+
+Yes.  Let us teach our children thus on both sides of the Atlantic.  For
+if they--which God forbid--should grow corrupt and weak by their own
+sins, there is no hardier race now left on earth to conquer our
+descendants and bring them back to reason, as those old Jews were
+brought, by bitter shame and woe.  And all that is before them and the
+whole civilised world, would be long centuries of anarchy such as the
+world has not seen for ages--a true Ragnarok, a twilight of the very
+gods, an age such as the wise woman foretold in the old Voluspa.
+
+    When brethren shall be
+    Each other's bane,
+    And sisters' sons rend
+    The ties of kin.
+    Hard will be that age,
+    An age of bad women,
+    An axe-age, a sword-age,
+    Shields oft cleft in twain,
+    A storm-age, a wolf-age,
+    Ere earth meet its doom.
+
+So sang, 2,000 years ago, perhaps, the great unnamed prophetess of our
+own race, of what might be, if we should fail mankind and our own calling
+and election.
+
+God grant that day may never come.  But God grant, also, that if that day
+does come, then may come true also what that wise Vala sang, of the day
+when gods, and men, and earth should be burnt up with fire.
+
+    When slaked Surtur's flame is,
+    Still the man and the maiden,
+    Hight Valour and Life,
+    Shall keep themselves hid
+    In the wood of remembrance.
+    The dew of the dawning
+    For food it shall serve them;
+    From them spring new peoples.
+
+New peoples.  For after all is said, the ideal form of human society is
+democracy.
+
+A nation--and, were it even possible, a whole world--of free men, lifting
+free foreheads to God and Nature; calling no man master--for one is their
+master, even God; knowing and obeying their duties towards the Maker of
+the Universe, and therefore to each other, and that not from fear, nor
+calculation of profit or loss, but because they loved and liked it, and
+had seen the beauty of righteousness and trust and peace; because the law
+of God was in their hearts, and needing at last, it may be, neither king
+nor priest, for each man and each woman, in their place, were kings and
+priests to God.  Such a nation--such a society.  What nobler conception
+of mortal existence can we form?  Would not that be, indeed, the kingdom
+of God come on earth?
+
+And tell me not that that is impossible--too fair a dream to be ever
+realised.  All that makes it impossible is the selfishness, passions,
+weaknesses, of those who would be blest were they masters of themselves,
+and therefore of circumstances; who are miserable because, not being
+masters of themselves, they try to master circumstance, to pull down iron
+walls with weak and clumsy hands, and forget that he who would be free
+from tyrants must first be free from his worst tyrant, self.
+
+But tell me not that the dream is impossible.  It is so beautiful that it
+must be true.  If not now, nor centuries hence, yet still hereafter.  God
+would never, as I hold, have inspired man with that rich imagination had
+he not meant to translate, some day, that imagination into fact.
+
+The very greatness of the idea, beyond what a single mind or generation
+can grasp, will ensure failure on failure,--follies, fanaticisms,
+disappointments, even crimes, bloodshed, hasty furies, as of children
+baulked of their holiday.
+
+But it will be at last fulfilled, filled full, and perfected; not perhaps
+here, or among our peoples, or any people which now exist on earth: but
+in some future civilisation--it may be in far lands beyond the sea--when
+all that you and we have made and done shall be as the forest-grown
+mounds of the old nameless civilisers of the Mississippi valley.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                            LONDON: PRINTED BY
+                 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
+                          AND PARLIAMENT STREET
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{71}  Black, translator of Mallett's _Northern Antiquities_,
+Supplementary Chapter I., and Rafn's _Antiquitates Americanae_.
+
+{91}  On the Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES DELIVERED IN AMERICA IN
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