dded to you.

This devotion to beauty and to the creation of beautiful things is the
test of all great civilised nations. Philosophy may teach us to bear
with equanimity the misfortunes of our neighbours, and science resolve
the moral sense into a secretion of sugar, but art is what makes the life
of each citizen a sacrament and not a speculation, art is what makes the
life of the whole race immortal.

For beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall
away like sand, and creeds follow one another like the withered leaves of
autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession
for all eternity.

Wars and the clash of armies and the meeting of men in battle by trampled
field or leagured city, and the rising of nations there must always be.
But I think that art, by creating a common intellectual atmosphere
between all countries, might--if it could not overshadow the world with
the silver wings of peace--at least make men such brothers that they
would not go out to slay one another for the whim or folly of some king
or minister, as they do in Europe. Fraternity would come no more with
the hands of Cain, nor Liberty betray freedom with the kiss of Anarchy;
for national hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest.

'How could I?' said Goethe, when reproached for not writing like Korner
against the French. 'How could I, to whom barbarism and culture alone
are of importance, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated of
the earth, a nation to which I owe a great part of my own cultivation?'

Mighty empires, too, there must always be as long as personal ambition
and the spirit of the age are one, but art at least is the only empire
which a nation's enemies cannot take from her by conquest, but which is
taken by submission only. The sovereignty of Greece and Rome is not yet
passed away, though the gods of the one be dead and the eagles of the
other tired.

And we in our Renaissance are seeking to create a sovereignty that will
still be England's when her yellow leopards have grown weary of wars and
the rose of her shield is crimsoned no more with the blood of battle; and
you, too, absorbing into the generous heart of a great people this
pervading artistic spirit, will create for yourselves such riches as you
have never yet created, though your land be a network of railways and
your cities the harbours for the galleys of the world.

I know, indeed, that the divine n