n
Rings to the roar of an angel onset--
Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
And bloom profuse and cedar arches
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,
Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,
And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods
Whisper in odorous heights of even.
TENNYSON.

{7}

MILTON

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

When a man spends a day walking in hilly country he is often astonished
at the new shape taken on by a mountain when it is looked at from a new
point of view. Sometimes the change is so great as to make it almost
unrecognizable. He who has seen Snowdon from Capel-Curig is reluctant
to admit that what he sees from Llanberis is the same mountain: he who
has seen the Langdale Pikes from Glaramara is amazed at their beauty as
he gazes at them from the garden at Low Wood. These are extreme cases.
But to a less degree every traveller among the mountains is
experiencing the same thing all day. He finds the eternal hills the
most plastic of forms. At each change in his own position there is a
change in the shape of a mountain under which he is passing. He may
keep his eye fixed upon it but insensibly, as he watches, the long {8}
chain will become a vertical peak, the jagged precipice a round green
slope.

Much the same process goes on as the generations of men pass on their
way, with their eyes fixed, as they cannot help being, on the great
human heights of their own and earlier days. Many of these look great
only when you are close to them. At a little distance they are seen to
be small and soon they disappear altogether. The true mountains remain
but they do not keep the same shape. Each succeeding generation sees
the peaks of humanity from a new point of view which cannot be exactly
the same as that of its predecessor. Each age reshapes for itself its
conception of art, of poetry, of religion, and of human life which
includes them all. Of some of the masters in each of these worlds it
feels that they belong not to their own generation only but to all time
and so to itself. It cannot be satisfied, therefore, with what its
predecessors have said about them. It needs to see them again freshly
for itself, and put into words so far as it can its own attitude
towards them.

That is the excuse for the new books which will always be written every
few years about Hebrew Re