inuing to be. The things which have been are fallen into decay, are
fallen into incompetence; large masses of mankind, in every society of
our Europe, are no longer capable of living at all by the things which
have been. When millions of men can no longer by their utmost exertion
gain food for themselves, and "the third man for thirty-six weeks each
year is short of third-rate potatoes," the things which have been must
decidedly prepare to alter themselves!--I will now quit this of the
organization of Men of Letters.

Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ours
was not the want of organization for Men of Letters, but a far deeper
one; out of which, indeed, this and so many other evils for the Literary
Man, and for all men, had, as from their fountain, taken rise. That our
Hero as Man of Letters had to travel without highway, companionless,
through an inorganic chaos,--and to leave his own life and faculty lying
there, as a partial contribution towards _pushing_ some highway through
it: this, had not his faculty itself been so perverted and paralyzed, he
might have put up with, might have considered to be but the common lot
of Heroes. His fatal misery was the _spiritual paralysis_, so we may
name it, of the Age in which his life lay; whereby his life too, do what
he might, was half paralyzed! The Eighteenth was a _Sceptical_ Century;
in which little word there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries.
Scepticism means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all
sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few
centuries that one could specify since the world began, was a life of
Heroism more difficult for a man. That was not an age of Faith,--an
age of Heroes! The very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were,
formally abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever;
Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. The "age of
miracles" had been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer.
An effete world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now
dwell;--in one word, a godless world!

How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time,--compared
not with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan
Skalds, with any species of believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil,
with the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs,
deep-rooted as Hela, has died out into the clanking of a World-MACHINE.
"Tree" and