perfect forms of naturalism. In those plays we see the human race coming back after a long absence. It came back not in perfect beauty. It came back quarreling, fighting, loving and swearing, eloquent, wise and silly, but yet it was a great blessing to the world to have all this earthly business resumed at the old stand. This return of reason made it easier for Lord Bacon to reach and teach his earthly philosophy. The dark ages had dispensed with all terrestrial data. The fields, the woods, the homes, the political questions gained nothing from observation and experience. Bacon asked mankind to study its own affairs, from its government down to its wagon-road; to turn away from magical scenes and study only the phenomena that come always, for all and in obedience to law. It must exchange celestial data for earthly facts. When an age possesses a literature, that literature will always reveal the condition of the separate times, and will explain each successive rise or fall. If we look back from our London to early Athens we perceive that entire period to be contained in a most prolific growth of written thought. In that thought lies an adequate biography of the men and women who lived and died in the twenty-five centuries. This literature is the glass in which we still see all those absent faces. As often villages are seen in the sky reflected upward and held in the blue, so literature spans the past, and like a mirror picks up the pictures of the Cicero who wore the greatness of a statesman, and the picture of the assassins who murdered him for his virtues; the pictures of Augustine, who was a citizen of only the new Jerusalem; the picture of a saint for whom the snow turned into blossoms; the picture of the Shakespearean persons who stood on the solid ground; the picture of Francis Bacon urging the surrounding scholars to become the lovers of reason and the students of facts. But this mirror composed of literature does not tell us all the particulars that once lay beneath. It catches only great outlines of causes and results. It permits us to imagine through the dark ages great pencils of light and sunny islands in the shadowy sea. Youth, middle life, and later age acted their sweet dramas. The four seasons worked on and on as the sublime artists of nature. There was some child to hunt in the grass for each blossom, there was some beautiful girl to chant her love song in the moonbeam. On the farther side of the dark ravine the human race marched down as magicians. They are like spiritualists in a long seance. On this side of the ravine they are emerging as philosophers—their magic having been left behind. The Roman church helped lead men into the dark valley. It helped lead them out. Dante and Beatrice, Romeo and Juliet were Catholics. They all belonged to the close of the thirteenth century. The St. Cecilias and St. Bridgets and St. Patricks did not emerge from the sunken country. As we watch and listen we perceive that the saints are gone, and that Romeo and Juliet are whispering among bowers that are full of nightingales. Liter ature had let fall its burden of incredible wonders that it might evermore carry lov ingly the rich realities of human life. |