f all enterprises, in which human faculties are exalted to
their highest, and beauties and majesties are manifested in multitude as
they are never by solitary man or by disunited peoples. In the highest
civilizations the individual citizen is raised above himself and made
part of a greater life, which we may call the National Being. He enters
into it, and it becomes in oversoul to him, and gives to all his works
a character and grandeur and a relation to the works of his
fellow-citizens, so that all he does conspires with the labors of
others for unity and magnificence of effect. So ancient Egypt, with its
temples, sphinxes, pyramids, and symbolic decorations, seems to us as
if it had been created by one grandiose imagination; for even the lesser
craftsmen, working on the mummy case for the tomb, had much of the
mystery and solemnity in their work which is manifest in temple and
pyramid. So the city States in ancient Greece in their day were united
by ideals to a harmony of art and architecture and literature. Among the
Athenians at their highest the ideal of the State so wrought upon the
individual that its service became the overmastering passion of life,
and in that great oration of Pericles, where he told how the Athenian
ideal inspired the citizens so that they gave their bodies for the
commonwealth, it seems to have been conceived of as a kind of oversoul,
a being made up of immortal deeds and heroic spirits, influencing the
living, a life within their life, molding their spirits to its likeness.
It appears almost as if in some of these ancient famous communities the
national ideal became a kind of tribal deity, that began first with
some great hero who died and was immortalized by the poets, and whose
character, continually glorified by them, grew at last so great in song
that he could not be regarded as less than a demi-god. We can see in
ancient Ireland that Cuchulain, the dark sad man of the earlier tales,
was rapidly becoming a divinity, a being who summed up in himself all
that the bards thought noblest in the spirit of their race; and
if Ireland had a happier history no doubt one generation of bardic
chroniclers after another would have molded that half-mythical figure
into the Irish ideal of all that was chivalrous, tender, heroic, and
magnanimous, and it would have been a star to youth, and the thought of
it a staff to the very noblest. Even as Cuchulain alone at the ford held
it against a host, so the idea