That Homer in the end might tell;
O'er grovelling generations past
Upstood the Gothic fane at last;
And countless hearts in countless years
Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,
Rude laughter and unmeaning tears;
Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome
The pure perfection of her dome.
Others I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toils shall see;
And (they forgotten and unknown)
Young children gather as their own
The harvest that the dead had sown.

WALTER HORATIO PATER

1839-1894

COLERIDGE'S WRITINGS (1866)

_Conversations, Letters, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge._ Edited
by THOMAS ALLSOP. London. 1864.

Forms of intellectual and spiritual culture often exercise their
subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing from them.
Searching and irresistible as are the changes of the human spirit on
its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of temper that
what must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all at once even
from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one law of
development evolves ideas, moralities, modes of inward life, and
represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier
growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the
whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the
spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined
by the antagonism of the new. That current of new life chastens them
as they contend against it. Weaker minds do not perceive the change;
clearer minds abandon themselves to it. To feel the change everywhere,
yet not to abandon oneself to it, is a situation of difficulty and
contention. Communicating in this way to the passing stage of culture
the charm of what is chastened, high-strung, athletic, they yet
detach the highest minds from the past by pressing home its
difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such is the charm of
Julian, of St. Louis, perhaps of Luther; in the narrower compass of
modern times, of Dr. Newman and Lacordaire; it is also the peculiar
charm of Coleridge.

Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the
'relative' spirit in place of the 'absolute'. Ancient philosophy
sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in
a necessary formula, and types of life in a classification by 'kinds'
or _genera_. To the modern spirit nothing is, or