e chords that make the "full close" in
music content us? Or shall we re-interpret it in our own prose? Where
any mind strives after justice, where any soul suffers and loves and
defies, there is the ideal Republic.

* * * * *

We have moved from Dr. Price's sermon to Shelley's chorus. The eloquent
old man, preaching in the first flush of hope that came with the new
time, conceived that his eyes had seen the great salvation. The day of
tyrants and priests was already over, and before the earth closed on his
grave, a free Europe would be linked in a confederacy that had abolished
war. A generation passed, and the winged victory is now a struggling
hope, her pinions singed with the heat of battle, her song mingled with
the rumour of massacre, speeding, a fugitive from fact, to the diviner
climes of an ideal world. The logic of the revolution has worked to its
predestined conclusion. It dreamed too eagerly of the end. It thought in
indictments. It packed the present on its tumbrils, and cleared away the
past with its dialectical guillotine. When the present was condemned and
the past buried, the future had somehow eluded it. It executed the
mother, and marvelled that the child should die.

The human mind can never be satisfied with the mere assurance that
sooner or later the golden years will come. The mere lapse of time is in
itself intolerable. If our waking life and our years of action are to
regain a meaning, we must perceive that the process of evolution is
itself significant and interesting. We are to-day so penetrated with
that thought, that the notion of a state of perfection in the future
seems to us as inconceivable and as little interesting as Rousseau's
myth of a state of innocence in the past. We know very well that our
ideal, whether we see it in the colours of Plato or Godwin or William
Morris, does but measure the present development of our faculties. Long
before the dream is realised in fact, a new horizon will have been
unfolded before the imagination of mankind.

What is of value in this endless process is precisely the unfolding of
ideals which record themselves, however imperfectly, in institutions,
and still more the developing sense of comradeship and sympathy which
links us in relations of justice and love with every creature that
feels. We are old enough to pass lightly over the enthusiastic paradoxes
that intoxicated the youth of the progressive idea. It is a truth