s mute and awestruck. The cook takes
the pig from the stye and the apple from the tree and makes a pretty lyric
for the dinner-table. The Great Adventure, in short, is just this
passionate pursuit of the soul of harmony in things, great and small,
spiritual and material. We are all in the quest and our captains are those
who lead us to the highest peaks of revelation--Bach fashioning that
immortal Concerto for Two Violins that takes us out like unsullied children
into fields of asphodel; Wordsworth looking out over Tintern Abbey and
capturing for us that

Sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky and in the mind of man;

Botticelli weaving the magic lines of the _Madonna of the Magnificat_ into
a harmony that, once deeply felt, seems to dwell in the heart for ever. And
you and I, though we are not captains in the adventure, all have our
glimpses--glorious moments when the mind sings in tune with circumstance,
when the beauty of the world, or the sense of fellowship with men or the
anthem of incommunicable things seems to open out the vision of something
that we would fain possess and are meant to possess.

"A mirage," you say, being a cynical person--"a mirage just to keep us
going through the desert--a sort of carrot held before the nose of that
donkey, man." Well, looking at the world to-day, it does rather seem that,
if harmony is the main concern of the adventure, humanity had better give
up the enterprise. In the light of the events in which we live, man is not
merely the most discordant creature on earth: he is also the most ferocious
animal that exists. Dryden's famous lines read like a satire:--

From harmony, from heavenly harmony.
This universal frame began;
From harmony to harmony, through all the compass of the
notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.

If Dryden could see Europe to-day he might at least find one flaw in that
ode of which he had so exalted an opinion.

But the story of man is a long story, and we cannot see its drift from any
episode, however vast and catastrophic. We are still only in the turbulent
childhood of our career, and frightful as our excesses are, there is a
motive behind them that makes them profoundly different from the wars of
old. That motive is the idea of human liberty, the sanctity of public law,
the