something Hellenic in your air
and world, something that has a quicker breath of the joy and power of
Elizabeth's England about it than our ancient civilisation can give us.
For you, at least, are young; 'no hungry generations tread you down,' and
the past does not weary you with the intolerable burden of its memories
nor mock you with the ruins of a beauty, the secret of whose creation you
have lost. That very absence of tradition, which Mr. Ruskin thought
would rob your rivers of their laughter and your flowers of their light,
may be rather the source of your freedom and your strength.

To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the
movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees
in the woods and grass by the roadside, has been defined by one of your
poets as a flawless triumph of art. It is a triumph which you above all
nations may be destined to achieve. For the voices that have their
dwelling in sea and mountain are not the chosen music of Liberty only;
other messages are there in the wonder of wind-swept height and the
majesty of silent deep--messages that, if you will but listen to them,
may yield you the splendour of some new imagination, the marvel of some
new beauty.

'I foresee,' said Goethe, 'the dawn of a new literature which all people
may claim as their own, for all have contributed to its foundation.' If,
then, this is so, and if the materials for a civilisation as great as
that of Europe lie all around you, what profit, you will ask me, will all
this study of our poets and painters be to you? I might answer that the
intellect can be engaged without direct didactic object on an artistic
and historical problem; that the demand of the intellect is merely to
feel itself alive; that nothing which has ever interested men or women
can cease to be a fit subject for culture.

I might remind you of what all Europe owes to the sorrow of a single
Florentine in exile at Verona, or to the love of Petrarch by that little
well in Southern France; nay, more, how even in this dull, materialistic
age the simple expression of an old man's simple life, passed away from
the clamour of great cities amid the lakes and misty hills of Cumberland,
has opened out for England treasures of new joy compared with which the
treasures of her luxury are as barren as the sea which she has made her
highway, and as bitter as the fire which she would make her slave.

But I think it