exercises man’s faculty at its highest pitch, and that the method of idealism is its law, are bid step down, while others more newly grounded in what belongs to literature possess the city; but seeing the shrines interdicted, the obliteration of ancient names, the heroes’ statues thrown down, shall we learn what our predecessors never knew—­to abdicate and abandon?  I hear in the temples the footsteps of the departing gods—­

    Di quibus imperium hoc steterat;

but no; for our opponents are worse off than those of whom it was said that though one rose from the dead they would not believe,—­Plato, being dead, yet speaks, Shakspere treads our boards, and (why should I hesitate?) Tennyson yet breathes among us though already immortal.  That which convinced the master minds of antiquity and many in later ages is still convincing, if it be attended to; the old tradition is yet unbroken; therefore, because I was bred in this faith, I will try to set forth anew in the phrases of our time the eternal ground of reason on which idealism rests.

The specific question concerns literature and its method, but its import is not mainly literary.  Life is the matter of literature; and thence it comes that all leading inquiries to which literature gives rise probe for their premises to the roots of our being and expand in their issues to the unknown limits of human fate.  It is an error to think of idealism as a thing remote, fantastic, and unsubstantial.  It enters intimately into the lives of all men, however humble and unlearned, if they live at all except in their bodies.  What is here proposed is neither speculative, technical, nor abstruse; it is practical in matter, universal in interest, and touches upon those things which men most should heed.  I fear rather to incur the reproach of uttering truisms than paradoxes.  But he does ill who is scornful of the trite.  To be learned in commonplaces is no mean education.  They make up the great body of the people’s knowledge.  They are the living words upon the lips of men from generation to generation; the real winged words; the matter of the unceasing reiteration of families, schools, pulpits, libraries; the tradition of mankind.  Proverb, text, homily,—­happy the youth whose purse is stored with these broad pieces, current, in every country and for every good, like fairy gifts of which the occasion only when it arises shows the use.  It is with truth as with beauty,—­familiarity endears and makes it more precious.  What is common is for that very reason in danger of neglect, and from it often flashes that divine surprise which most enkindles the soul.  Why must Prometheus bring fire from heaven to savage man?  Did it not sleep in the flint at his feet?  How often, at the master stroke of life, has some text of Holy Scripture, which lay in the mind from childhood almost like the debris of memory, illuminated the remorseful darkness of the mind, or interpreted the sweetness of God’s