force. The reign of law has never had more than a passing reality, and
never can have more than that so long as man is human. The individual
intellect and the aggregate intelligence of nations and races have alike
perished in the struggles of mankind, to revive again, indeed, but as
surely to be again put to the edge of the sword. Here and there great
thoughts and great masterpieces have survived the martyrdom of a
thinker, the extinction of a school, the death of a poet, the wreck of a
high civilisation. Socrates is murdered with the creed of immortality on
his very lips; hardly had he spoken the wonderful words recorded in the
_Phaedo_ when the fatal poison sent its deathly chill through his limbs;
the Greeks are gone, yet the Hermes of Olympia remains, mutilated and
maimed, indeed, but faultless still, and still supreme. The very name
of Homer is grown wellnigh as mythic as his blindness. There are those
to-day who, standing by the grave of William Shakespeare, say boldly
that he was not the creator of the works that bear his name. And still,
through the centuries, Achilles wanders lonely by the shore of the
sounding sea; Paris loves, and Helen is false; Ajax raves, and Odysseus
steers his sinking ship through the raging storm. Still, Hamlet the
Avenger swears, hesitates, kills at last, and then himself is slain;
Romeo sighs in the ivory moonlight, and love-bound Juliet hears the
triumphant lark carolling his ringing hymn high in the cool morning
air, and says it is the nightingale--Immortals all, the marble god, the
Greek, the Dane, the love-sick boy, the maiden foredoomed to death. But
how short is the roll-call of these deathless ones! Through what raging
floods of destruction have they lived, through what tempests have they
been tossed, upon what inhospitable shores have they been cast up by
the changing tides of time! Since they were called to life by the
great, half-nameless departed, how often has their very existence been
forgotten by all but a score in tens of millions? Has it been given to
those embodied thoughts of transcendent genius to ride in the whirlwind
of men's passions or to direct the stormy warfare of half frantic
nations? Since they were born in all their bright perfection, to live
on in unchanging beauty, violence has ruled the world; many a time since
then the sword has mown down its harvest of thinkers, many a time has
the iron harrow of war torn up and scarred the face of the earth. Athens
s