s tragic course this despair adds a metaphysical touch
to his doom. Five Popes have succeeded him who anointed Bonaparte, and
the very era of Darwin and Strauss has been illustrated or derided by
the bull, "_Ineffabilis Deus_," the Council of the Vatican, the
thronged pilgrimages to Lourdes, and the neo-Romanism of French
_litterateurs_. The Hellenism of Goethe was a protest against this
movement, at once in its intellectual and its literary forms, the
Romanticism of Tieck and Novalis, the cultured pietism of Lammenais and
Chateaubriand. Yet in _Faust_ Goethe attempted a reconciliation of
Hellas and the Middle Age, and the work is not only the supreme
literary achievement of the century, but its greatest prophetic book.
Then science became the ally of poetry and speculative thought in the
war against Obscurantism, Ultramontanism, and Jesuitism in all its
forms. Geology flung back the aeons of the past till they receded
beyond imagination's wing. Astronomy peopled with a myriad suns the
infinite solitudes of space. The theory of evolution stirred the
common heart of Europe to a fury of debate upon questions confined till
then to the studious calm of the few. The ardour to know all, to be
all, to do all, here upon earth and now, which the nineteenth century
had inherited from the Renaissance, quickened every inventive faculty
of man, and surprise has followed surprise. The aspirations of the
Revolutionary epoch towards some ideal of universal humanity, its
sympathy with the ideals of all the past, Hellas, Islam, the Middle
Age, received from the theories of science, and from increased
facilities of communication and locomotion, a various and most living
impulse. As man to the European imagination became isolated in space,
and the earth a point lost in the sounding vastness of the atom-shower
of the worlds, he also became conscious to himself as one. The bounds
of the earth, his habitation, drew nearer as the stars receded, and
surveying the past, his history seemed less a withdrawal from the
Divine than an ever-deepening of the presence of the Divine within the
soul.

That which in speculation pre-eminently distinguishes the Europe of the
nineteenth century from preceding centuries--the gradually
increasing dominion of Oriental thought, art, and action--has
strengthened this impression. An age mystic in its religion, symbolic
in its art, and in its politics apathetic or absolutist, succeeds an
age of formal