l unifies all things, and is then most in the present when
most deeply absorbed in the past. The soul of man is the true Logos of
the universe. It is the contemporary of all the ages, and to none of
the aeons is it a stranger. It heard the informing voice which
instructed the planets in their paths, which moulded the rocks, the
bones of the earth, and cast the sea and the far-stretched plains and
the hills about them like a covering of flesh. Therefore time and
death and nothingness are but shadows, which the intellect of man sets
over against the substance which lives and is eternally.

And thus in the vicissitudes of States, even more impressively than
elsewhere in the universal process of transformation which Nature is,
the daring metaphor of the Hebrew, "As a vesture shalt Thou change
them, and they shall be changed," seems realized. The death of a
State, the fall of an empire, are but phases in their history, by which
a complete self-realization is attained, or the perpetuation of their
ideals under other forms, as Egypt in Hellas, Hellas in Rome, is
secured.

In Portugal's short span of empire, her day of brief and troubled
splendour, her monarchs realize, even at the hazard of a temporary
eclipse of the nation's independence, the aspirations of the race,
which slowly arising, and growing in force and intensity, had become
the fixed, tyrannous desire of a people, until, in Camoens' terse
phrase of Manuel, "from that one great thought it never swerved."
Another policy and other aims than those which her monarchs
pursued--tolerance instead of fanaticism, prudence instead of heroism,
national patriotism instead of imperial, homely common sense instead of
glorious wisdom--all or any of these might have warded off the doom of
Portugal and of the house of Avis. Bur these things were not in the
blood of Lusitania, nor would this have been the nation of Vasco da
Gama and Camoens, of Alboquerque and Cabral. It is as vain to seek in
depopulation for the causes of the fall of Portugal as in the
Inquisition or the Papal power. Even Buckle, that mighty statistician,
would hardly risk the determining of the ratio which may not be
overstepped between the bounds of an empire and the extent of the
nation which creates it. If her yeomen forsook the fields and left the
soil of Portugal unfilled, if her chivalry forsook their estates, the
question confronts us: What is the character, the heart of a race which
acts in this