So Carlyle said of the souls of his heroes. So when Helena, in Goethe’s poem, called from the realms of night, returns again to the shades, she leaves to Faust her tunic and her veil; the vestments are not herself, but as she has worn them, they breathe of her divineness and possess ever a spell to elevate the soul of him who keeps them above all vulgar things.

An organized society which limits its idea of civilization to the accumulation of material abundance, and of justice to their equitable distribution among its members, will never make of its great cities anything that differs essentially from the heaping-up of anthills. Populous, opulent cities do not suffice to make a civilization immutable, intensive; they are, indeed, necessary for the highest culture, are its natural atmosphere; the soul of the great man can rarely grow from amid the petty interests of small towns; but this quantitative side of a nation’s greatness, like the size of its armies, is but means, not results. Of the stones of Carthage not one remains to bear any message of light, and all the immensity of Babylon or Nineveh does not fill in human memory the hollow of man’s hand as compared with the few furlongs that lie between the Acropolis and the Piraeus. In the perspective of the ideal no city appears great, though it occupy all the space around the towers of Nimrod, nor strong because it can build again those Babylonian walls which carried six chariots abreast; nor beautiful because it was paved with flagstones of alabaster and girt with the gardens of Semiramis.... No. In this view that city only is great whose spirit’s barriers extend far beyond the mountains or the seas, whose very name pronounced illuminates for posterity an epoch of human thought, a horizon of history. It is strong and lovely when its days are something more than the invariable repetition of the same echo, repeated in never-ending circle; when in it there is something which floats above the faces of the crowd; when amid its night lights there are the lamps which light the solitude of vigils devoted only to thought; thoughts whence germinate ideas which are to come to the sunlight of the coming day with a cry to humanity, a force that shall compel men’s souls.

Then only may the extent and material greatness of the city measure the intensity of its civilization. Royal capitals, avenues of proud palaces, are a narrower home than the desert for man’s thinking when it is not thought that overlords them. In Tennyson’s “Maud” there is a symbol of this torturing of the soul when man’s society leaves it still in solitude; where the hero in his madness dreams himself to be dead and buried but a few feet underground, beneath a London pavement; and his consciousness remains, despite his death, attached to the poor remains of his body; the confused clamour of the street makes a dull rumbling that shakes his narrow tomb and impedes his every dream of peace; the weight of an indifferent multitude weighs heavily above his grave, the heavy tread of horses seems to trample on it with disdain; the days succeed days with inexorable tedium. And Maud would wish her grave still farther, farther down, deeper yet within the earth; the dim noises of its surface serve but to keep alive the consciousness that she is dead.

Already there exist, in our Latin America, cities whose material grandeur and apparent civilization place them in the first rank; but one may fear lest a touch of thought upon their exterior, so sumptuous, may make the shining vessel ring hollow within; lest our cities too—though they had their Moreno, their Rivadavia, their Sarmiento, cities which gave initiative to an immortal revolution that, like a stone cast on water, spread the glory of their heroes and the words of their tribunes in ever-widening circles over a vast continent — may end like Tyre or Sidon, or as Carthage ended.

It is your generation that must prevent this; the youth which is of to-day, blood and muscle and nerve of the future. I speak to you, seeing in you those who are destined to guide the others in coming battles for a spiritual cause. The perseverance of your strength must be in you as your certainty of victory. Be not afraid to preach the evangel of refinement to the Scythians, of intelligence to the Boeotians, of disinterest to the Phoenicians. It is enough that thought insists on being, on showing that it exists, as Diogenes proved of movement, to make its spread irresistible and its ultimate triumph secure. Palm by palm, of its own impulse, it will win what space it needs to establish its kingdom among all the other manifestations of life. In its physical organization it will elevate and augment the hollow of the very skull it works in, by its own activity: the thinking races in their physiological growth reveal this power of the unseen workman within. In his social organization also will the thinker well knowhow to broaden the stage for his drama without the intervention of any power alien to his own. But that conviction, which should preserve from a discouragement whose one utility is to make us rid ourselves of the mean and mediocre, should also keep us from the impatience which demands from time any alteration of its majestic rhythm.

Every one who devotes himself to propagate and preserve in contemporary America a disinterested ideal of the soul — art, science, ethics, religious belief, a political policy of ideals — should educate his belief in the persevering preparation for the future. The past belonged entirely to the sword arm; the present seems well-nigh given over to the horny hand that clears away and builds; the future—a future that seems all the nearer as the thinking and willing of those who look forward to it grow more earnest — shall offer the stability, the scenario, the right atmosphere, to make possible the higher evolution of man’s soul.

Can you not picture to yourselves the America we others dream of? Hospitable to things of the spirit, and not only to the immigrant throngs; thoughtful, without sacrificing its energy of action; serene and strong and withal full of generous enthusiasm; resplendent with the charm of morning calm like the smile of a waking infant, jet with the light of awakening thought. Think on her at least; the honour of your future history depends on your keeping constantly before your eyes the vision of that America, radiant above the realities of the present like the rose window above the dark nave of a cathedral.... You may not be its founders; but you will at all events be its forerunners. In the glories of the future there be also palms for such. To prepare the advent of a new human type, a new social unity, a profound student of history, Edgar Quinet, has observed that there always precedes, long before, a scattered group, premature, whose rôle in the evolution of society is like that of the prophetic species in biology discovered by Héer. The new type begins by barely signalizing individualities; these later get organized into varieties, and finally these last, encountering a favouring medium, attain the rank of a species; then, says Quinet, the “group” becomes the multitude, and rules.

This is why your moral philosophy, in labour or in combat, should be the reverse of the Horatian carpe diem ; treat the present moment only as the first step in the stairway you are to tread, or as a breach in the enemy wall you are to enter by. Ask not at once for the final victory, but for bettering your conditions for the conflict. Thus will your energy have the greater stimulus, since the dramatic interest is

greater in the continual renewal and advance, fit school to purify the forces of an heroic generation, than in the serene and Olympic attitude in which a golden age might invest the acolytes of its glory. “It is not the possession of good things, but their attainment which gives to man delight and glory in his power,” said Taine, speaking of the happy times of the Renaissance.

Perhaps it were an audacious and ingenuous hope to believe in so rapid and fortunate an evolution, so efficacious an employment of your powers, as to expect that the span of your own generation will suffice to bring in America the conditions of intellectual life; from our now primitive surroundings a true social interest; from our present dead level a summit which shall really be supreme. But where there may not be entire transformation there may be progress; and even though you know that the first fruits of the soil you labour may not be yours, they will if you are generous and brave be a new stimulus to action. The best work is that which is realized without impatience for immediate success, the most glorious effort that which places the goal beyond the visible horizon, and the purest abnegation that which renounces for the present, not indeed the laurel of men’s applause, but the bliss of seeing one’s labour consummate and its goal attained.

Antiquity had altars “for the unknown Gods.” Consecrate a part of your soul to the unknown future.