: if we ever become wise enough to dress consistently and
gracefully, to make health a principal object in education, and to
render our streets beautiful with art, the external charm of past
history will in great measure disappear. There is no essential reason,
because we live after the fatal seventeenth century, that we should
never again be able to confess interest in sculpture, or see
brightness in embroidery; nor, because now we choose to make the night
deadly with our pleasures, and the day with our labours, prolonging
the dance till dawn, and the toil to twilight, that we should never
again learn how rightly to employ the sacred trusts of strength,
beauty, and time. Whatever external charm attaches itself to the past,
would then be seen in proper subordination to the brightness of
present life; and the elements of romance would exist, in the earlier
ages, only in the attraction which must generally belong to whatever
is unfamiliar; in the reverence which a noble nation always pays to
its ancestors; and in the enchanted light which races, like
individuals, must perceive in looking back to the days of their
childhood.

Again: the peculiar levity with which natural scenery Is regarded by a
large number of modern minds cannot be considered as entirely
characteristic of the age, inasmuch as it never can belong to its
greatest intellects. Men of any high mental power must be serious,
whether in ancient or modern days: a certain degree of reverence for
fair scenery is found in all our great writers without exception,--even
the one who has made us laugh oftenest, taking us to the valley of
Chamouni, and to the sea beach, there to give peace after suffering,
and change revenge into pity.[118] It is only the dull, the uneducated,
or the worldly, whom it is painful to meet on the hillsides; and
levity, as a ruling character, cannot be ascribed to the whole nation,
but only to its holiday-making apprentices, and its House of Commons.

We need not, therefore, expect to find any single poet or painter
representing the entire group of powers, weaknesses, and inconsistent
instincts which govern or confuse our modern life. But we may expect
that in the man who seems to be given by Providence as the type of the
age (as Homer and Dante were given, as the types of classical and
mediaeval mind), we shall find whatever is fruitful and substantial to
be completely present, together with those of our weaknesses, which
are indeed nation