of the living world; to whom sorrow is a melody and joy sweet music; to whom the humblest effort of a humble life can furnish an immortal lyric, and in whom one thought of the Divine can inspire a sublime hymn.  Another stoops and takes a handful of clay from the earth, and with the pressure of his fingers moulds it to the reality of an unreal image seen in dreams; or, standing before the vast, rough block of marble, he sees within the mass the perfection of a faultless form—­he lays the chisel to the stone, the mallet strikes the steel, one by one the shapeless fragments fly from the shapely limbs, the matchless curves are uncovered, the breathing mouth smiles through the petrifaction of a thousand ages, the shroud of stone falls from the godlike brow, and the Hermes of Olympia stands forth in all his deathless beauty.  Another is born to the heritage of this world’s power, fore-destined to rule and fated to destroy; the naked sword of destiny lies in his cradle; the axe of a king-maker awaits the awakening of his strength; the sceptre of supreme empire hangs within his reach.  Unknown, he dreams and broods over the future; unheeded, he begins to move among his fellows; a smile, half of encouragement, half of indifference, greets his first effort; he advances a little farther, and thoughtful men look grave, another step, and suddenly all mankind cries out and faces him and would beat him back; but it is too late; one struggle more, and the hush of a great and unknown fear falls on the wrangling nations; they are silent, and the world is his.  He is the man who is already thinking when others have scarcely begun to feel; who is creating before the thoughts of his rivals have reached any conclusion; who acts suddenly, terribly and irresistibly, before their creations have received life.  And yet, the greatest and the richest inheritance of all is not his, for it has fallen to another, to the man of heart, and it is the inheritance of the kingdom of love.

In all ages the reason of the world has been at the mercy of brute force.  The reign of law has never had more than a passing reality, and never can have more than that so long as man is human.  The individual intellect and the aggregate intelligence of nations and races have alike perished in the struggles of mankind, to revive again, indeed, but as surely to be again put to the edge of the sword.  Here and there great thoughts and great masterpieces have survived the martyrdom of a thinker, the extinction of a school, the death of a poet, the wreck of a high civilisation.  Socrates is murdered with the creed of immortality on his very lips; hardly had he spoken the wonderful words recorded in the Phaedo when the fatal poison sent its deathly chill through his limbs; the Greeks are gone, yet the Hermes of Olympia remains, mutilated and maimed, indeed, but faultless still, and still supreme.  The very name of Homer is grown wellnigh as mythic as his blindness.  There are those to-day who, standing by the grave of William