nor of groups of lines organically co-ordinate,
but, as it were, a sphere shapen from within and moulded by that
Presence whose immanence, ever intensifying, is the Thought which time
realizes as the Deed. Man looks to the future and the coming of
Eternity. How shall the Eternal come or the Infinite be far off?
Behold, the Eternal is _now_, and the Infinite is _here_. And if the
high-upreared architecture of the stars, and the changing fabric of the
worlds, be but shadows, and the pageantry of time but a dream, yet the
dreamer and the dream are God.

If all be Illusion, yet this faith that all is Illusion can be none.
There the realm of Illusion ends, here Reality begins. And thus the
spirit of man, having touched the mother-abyss, arises victorious in
defeat to fix its gaze at last, steadfast and calm, upon the Eternal.

Such is the distinction of the Fourth Age, whose light is all about us,
flooding in from the eastern windows yonder like a great dawn. Man's
spirit, tutored by lost illusion after lost illusion, advances to an
ever deeper reality. The race, too, like the individual and the
nation, is subject to the Law of Tragedy. Once more, in the way of a
thousand years, it knows that it is not in time, nor in any cunning
manipulation or extension of the things of time, that Man the Timeless
can find the word which sums his destiny, and spurning at the phantoms
of space, save as they grant access to the Spaceless, casts itself back
upon God, and in art, thought, and action pierces to the Infinite
through the finite.

This mystic attribute, this _elan_ of the soul, discovers a fellowship
in thinkers wide apart in circumstance and mental environment. It is,
for instance, the trait which Schopenhauer, Tourgenieff,[7] Flaubert,
and Carlyle possess in common[8]. These men are not as others of their
time, but prophet voices that announce the Fourth, the latest Age,
whose dawn has laid its hand upon the eastern hills.

The restless imagination of Flaubert, fused from the blood of the
Norsemen, plunges into one period after another, Carthage, the Rome of
the Caesars, Syria, Egypt, and Galilee, the unchanging East, and the
monotony in change of the West, pursuing the one Vision in many forms,
the Vision which leads on Carlyle from stage to stage of a course
curiously similar. Flaubert has a wider range and more varied
sympathies than Carlyle, and in intensity of vision occasionally
surpasses him. Both are myst