orld and which seeks its satisfaction there, and that wistful life
of the spirit which has far thoughts and cannot settle down to the green
and homely earth,--it is natural that we should look for some literary
work which will describe the decisive issue of the whole conflict. Such
a work is Francis Thompson's _Hound of Heaven_, which is certainly one
of the most remarkable poems that have been published in England for
many years.

To estimate its full significance it is necessary in a few words to
recapitulate the course of thought which has been followed in the
preceding chapters. We began with the ancient Greeks, and distinguished
the high idealism of their religious conceptions from the paganism into
which these declined. The sense of the sacredness of beauty, forced upon
the Greek spirit by the earth itself, was a high idealism, without which
no conception of life or of the universe can be anything but a maimed
and incomplete expression of their meaning. Yet, for lack of some
sufficiently powerful element of restraint and some sufficiently daring
faith in spiritual reality, Hellenism sank back upon the mere earth, and
its dying fires lit up a world too sordid for their sacred flame. In
_Marius the Epicurean_ the one thing lacking was supplied by the faith
of early Christianity. The Greek idealism of beauty was not only
conserved but enriched, and the human spirit was revived, by that heroic
faith which endured as seeing the invisible. The two _Fausts_ revealed
the struggle at later stages of the development of Christianity.
Marlowe's showed it under the light of mediaeval theology and Goethe's
under that of modern humanism, with the curious result that in the
former tragedy the man is the pagan and the devil the idealist, while in
the latter this order is reversed. Omar Khayyam and Fiona Macleod
introduce the Oriental and the Celtic strains. In both there is the cry
of the senses and the strong desire and allurement of the green earth;
but in Fiona Macleod there is the dominant undertone of the eternal and
the spiritual, never silent and finally overwhelming.

The next two lectures, in a cross-section of the seventeenth century,
showed John Bunyan keenly alive to the literature and the life of the
world of Charles the Second's time, yet burning straight flame of
spiritual idealism with these for fuel. Over against him stood Samuel
Pepys, lusty and most amusing, declaring in every page of his _Diary_
the lengths to