s respected, and that is
America. If we do not take care, the high culture will desert our
shores, like Astraea's flying hem, and take her way Westward, with the
course of Empire.

A friend of mine once told me that he struggled up a church-tower in
Florence, a great lean, pale brick minaret, designed, I suppose, to be
laminated with marble, but cheerfully abandoned to bareness; he came
out on to one of those high balustraded balconies, which in mediaeval
pictures seem to have been always crowded with fantastically dressed
persons, and are now only visited by tourists. The silvery city lay
outspread beneath him, with the rapid mud-stained river passing to the
plain, the hill-side crowded with villas embowered in green gardens,
and the sad-coloured hills behind. While he was gazing, two other
tourists, young Americans, came quietly out on to the balcony, a
brother and sister, he thought. They looked out for a time in silence,
leaning on the parapet; and then the brother said softly, "How much
we should enjoy all this, if we were not so ignorant!" Like all
Americans, they wanted to know! It was not enough for them to see the
high houses, the fantastic towers, the great blind blocks of mediaeval
palaces, thrust so grimly out above the house-tops. It all meant life
and history, strife and sorrow, it all needed interpreting and
transfiguring and re-peopling; without that it was dumb and silent,
vague and bewildering. One does not know whether to admire or to sigh!
Ought one not to be able to take beauty as it comes? What if one does
not want to know these things, as Shelley said to his lean and
embarrassed tutor at Oxford? If knowledge makes the scene glow and
live, enriches it, illuminates it, it is well. And perhaps in England
we learn to live so incuriously and naturally among historical things
that we forget the existence of tradition, and draw it in with the air
we breathe, just realising it as a pleasant background and not caring
to investigate it or master it. It is hard to say what we lose by
ignorance, is hard to say what we should gain by knowledge. Perhaps to
want to know would be a sign of intellectual and emotional activity;
but it could not be done as a matter of duty--only as a matter of
enthusiasm.

The poet Clough once said, "It makes a great difference to me that
Magna Charta was signed at Runnymede, but it does not make much
difference to me to know that it was signed." The fact that it was so
signed af