mber stooped and faltered and came down in a
cataract of noises. And the fire, finding passage, went up with a spout
like a fountain. It stood far up among the stars for an instant, a
blazing pillar of brass fit for a pagan conqueror, so high that one
could fancy it visible away among the goblin trees of Burnham or along
the terraces of the Chiltern Hills.

THE FREE MAN

The idea of liberty has ultimately a religious root; that is why men
find it so easy to die for and so difficult to define. It refers finally
to the fact that, while the oyster and the palm tree have to save
their lives by law, man has to save his soul by choice. Ruskin rebuked
Coleridge for praising freedom, and said that no man would wish the sun
to be free. It seems enough to answer that no man would wish to be the
sun. Speaking as a Liberal, I have much more sympathy with the idea of
Joshua stopping the sun in heaven than with the idea of Ruskin trotting
his daily round in imitation of its regularity. Joshua was a Radical,
and his astronomical act was distinctly revolutionary. For all
revolution is the mastering of matter by the spirit of man, the
emergence of that human authority within us which, in the noble words of
Sir Thomas Browne, "owes no homage unto the sun."

Generally, the moral substance of liberty is this: that man is not meant
merely to receive good laws, good food or good conditions, like a
tree in a garden, but is meant to take a certain princely pleasure in
selecting and shaping like the gardener. Perhaps that is the meaning
of the trade of Adam. And the best popular words for rendering the real
idea of liberty are those which speak of man as a creator. We use the
word "make" about most of the things in which freedom is essential, as
a country walk or a friendship or a love affair. When a man "makes his
way" through a wood he has really created, he has built a road, like the
Romans. When a man "makes a friend," he makes a man. And in the third
case we talk of a man "making love," as if he were (as, indeed, he is)
creating new masses and colours of that flaming material an awful form
of manufacture. In its primary spiritual sense, liberty is the god in
man, or, if you like the word, the artist.

In its secondary political sense liberty is the living influence of the
citizen on the State in the direction of moulding or deflecting it. Men
are the only creatures that evidently possess it. On the one hand, the
eagle has no libe