Khayyam--

"Yet ah that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that on the branches sang,
Ah whence, and whither flown again, who knows?"

Yes, but what might Omar have been with a nobler philosophy
of life, and a more wholesome self-restraint. Blase, toper as he
was, how did he begin his Rubaiyat? Thus finely!

"Wake! For the Sun who scatter'd into flight
The stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav'n and strikes
The Sultan's turret with a Shaft of Light."

There was poetry in the man still--and that, too, of the kind
stirred by nature. And from nature likewise comes the pathos of
a closing verse--

"Yon rising Moon that looks for us again--
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;
How oft hereafter rising look for us
Through this same Garden--and for _one_ in vain! "

And if in spite of all that is said, Wordsworth's haunting Ode
still asserts its sway, then let there be a still more direct appeal
to its author. One of his loveliest sonnets is that which opens--

"It is a beauteous evening, calm and free."

He tells of the holy stillness, the setting of the broad sun, the
eternal motion of the sea. He is filled with a sense of mystic
adoration. And then there is a sudden turn of thought--

"Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouch'd by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine."

What is this but to regard the intuitional faculty as still largely
latent, awaiting the maturing processes of the passing years?
There is no place for further argument.

What has just been said of the child may be said of the race,
especially if there is anything in the theory that the child
recapitulates in brief the stages through which the race has
passed in its upward progress. In the dawn of civilisation the
senses would be comparatively fresh and keen, though lacking
in delicacy of aesthetic discrimination; the imagination would
be powerful and active. Hence the products, so varied and
immense, of the animistic tendency and the mytho-poeic
faculty. To these stages succeed the periods of reflective
thought and accurate research, which, while blunting to some
degree the sharp edge of sensibility, more than atone for the loss
by the widening of horizons and the deepening of mysteries. We
must be c