lose also those ideal
figures which the race accepts as embodiments of its secrets, hopes,
and aims. It is a significant fact that, in portraying the Greek of
his time, Homer has given us also the ideal Greek and the Greek
ideals. His insight went to the soul of the persons he described, and
he struck into that spiritual order in which the ideal is not only a
reality, but, in a sense, the only reality.

Cervantes, in the very act of destroying a false Idealism,
conventionally conceived and treated, made one of the most beautiful
revelations of a true Idealism which the world has yet received.
Shakespeare's presentation of the facts of life is, on the whole, the
most comprehensive and impressive which has yet been made; in the
disclosure of tragic elements it is unsurpassed; and yet what a host of
ideal figures move through the plays and invest them with a light
beyond the glow of art! In the Forest of Arden and on Prospero's
Island there live, beyond the touch of time and the vicissitudes of
fate, those gracious and beautiful spirits in whom the race sees its
noblest hopes come true, its instinctive faith in itself justified.
These spirits are not airy nothings, woven of the unsubstantial
gossamer of which dreams are made; they are born of a deep insight
into the possibilities of the soul, and a rational faith in their
reality. Prospero is as real as Trinculo, and Rosalind as true as
Cressida. These ideal persons are not necessarily fortunate in their
surroundings or happy in their lot; they are simply perfect in their
development of a type. They are not abnormal beings, rising above
normal conditions; they are normal beings, rising above abnormal
conditions. They stand for wholeness amid fragments, for perfection
amid imperfection; but the very imperfection and fragmentariness by
which they are surrounded predicts their coming and affirms their
reality.

In the rounded and developed nature there must be a deep vein of the
Idealism which grows out of the vision of things in their large
relations--out of a view of men ample enough to discern not only what
they are at this stage of development, but what they may become when
development has been completed. Nothing is more essential than the
courage, the joy, and the insight which grow out of such an Idealism,
and no spiritual possession is more easily lost. The spiritual
depression of a reactionary period, the routine of work, the immersion
in the stream of events, the