f what may be, of the objects of effort and the methods
of their attainment under mortal conditions. The difficulty of men in
respect to it is the lax power they have to see in it the truth, as
contradistinguished from the fact, the continuous reality of the things
of the mind in opposition to the accidental and partial reality of the
things of actuality. They think of it as an imagined, instead of as the
real world, the model of that which is in the evolution of that which
ought to be. In history the climaxes of art have always outrun human
realization; its crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests of the
never-attained; but they still make on in their mass to the yet rising
wave, which shall be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in the
cosmopolitan civilization which we hope for, the elements of the past,
yet surviving from the accomplishment of single famous cities and great
empires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, expressing the spiritual
uplifting to God of the reconciled and unified nations of the earth.

There remains but one last resort; for it will yet be urged that the
impossibility of any scientific knowledge of the spiritual order is
proved by the transience of the ideals of the past; one is displaced by
another, there is no permanence in them. It is true that the concrete
world, which must be employed by art, is one of sense, and necessarily
imports into the form of art its own mortality; it is, even in art, a
thing that passes away. It is also true that the world of knowledge,
which is the subject-matter of art, is in process of being known, and
necessarily imports into the contents of art its errors, its hypotheses,
its imperfections of every kind; it is a thing that grows more and more,
and in growing sheds its outworn shells, its past body. Let us consider
the form and the contents separately. The element of mortality in the
form is included in the transience of imagery. The poet uses the world
as he knows it, and reflects in successive ages of literature the
changing phases of civilization. The shepherd, the tiller of the soil,
the warrior, the trader yield to him their language of the earth, the
battle, and the sea; from the common altar he learns the speech of the
gods; the elemental aspects of nature, the pursuits of men, and what is
believed of the supernatural are the great storehouses of imagery. The
fact that it is at first a living act or habit that the poet deals with,
gives to his work