ve, in three thousand years, attained quite new significance. But
nobler than all in this kind are the Lives of heroic god-inspired Men;
for what other Work of Art is so divine? In Death too, in the Death of
the Just, as the last perfection of a Work of Art, may we not discern
symbolic meaning? In that divinely transfigured Sleep, as of Victory,
resting over the beloved face which now knows thee no more, read (if
thou canst for tears) the confluence of Time with Eternity, and some
gleam of the latter peering through.

"Highest of all Symbols are those wherein the Artist or Poet has risen
into Prophet, and all men can recognize a present God, and worship the
Same: I mean religious Symbols. Various enough have been such religious
Symbols, what we call _Religions_; as men stood in this stage of culture
or the other, and could worse or better body forth the Godlike: some
Symbols with a transient intrinsic worth; many with only an extrinsic.
If thou ask to what height man has carried it in this manner, look
on our divinest Symbol: on Jesus of Nazareth, and his Life, and his
Biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher has the human Thought
not yet reached: this is Christianity and Christendom; a Symbol of quite
perennial, infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be
anew inquired into, and anew made manifest.

"But, on the whole, as Time adds much to the sacredness of Symbols, so
likewise in his progress he at length defaces, or even desecrates them;
and Symbols, like all terrestrial Garments, wax old. Homer's Epos has
not ceased to be true; yet it is no longer our Epos, but shines in the
distance, if clearer and clearer, yet also smaller and smaller, like
a receding Star. It needs a scientific telescope, it needs to be
reinterpreted and artificially brought near us, before we can so much as
know that it _was_ a Sun. So likewise a day comes when the Runic
Thor, with his Eddas, must withdraw into dimness; and many an African
Mumbo-Jumbo and Indian Pawaw be utterly abolished. For all things, even
Celestial Luminaries, much more atmospheric meteors, have their rise,
their culmination, their decline.

"Small is this which thou tellest me, that the Royal Sceptre is but
a piece of gilt wood; that the Pyx has become a most foolish box, and
truly, as Ancient Pistol thought, 'of little price.' A right Conjurer
might I name thee, couldst thou conjure back into these wooden tools the
divine virtue they once held.