ect appeal which one who lives a higher and more
beautiful life can make to all unsatisfied souls, who would fain find
the way to a greater serenity of mood. Even upon earth we can see a
faint foreshadowing of this in the fact that the only personalities who
continue to hold the devotion and admiration of humanity are the
idealists. Men and women do not make pilgrimages to the graves and
houses of eminent jurists and bankers, political economists or
statisticians: these have done their work, and have had their reward.
Even the monuments of statesmen and conquerors have little power to
touch the imagination, unless some love for humanity, some desire to
uplift and benefit the race, have entered into their schemes and
policies. No, it is rather the soil which covers the bones of dreamers
and visionaries that is sacred yet, prophets and poets, artists and
musicians, those who have seen through life to beauty, and have lived
and suffered that they might inspire and tranquillise human hearts. The
princes of the earth, popes and emperors, lie in pompous sepulchres,
and the thoughts of those who regard them, as they stand in metal or
marble, dwell most on the vanity of earthly glory. But at the tombs of
men like Vergil and Dante, of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, the human
heart still trembles into tears, and hates the death that parts soul
from soul. So that if, like Dante, we could enter the shadow-land, and
hold converse with the spirits of the dead, we should seek out to
consort with, not those who have subdued and wasted the earth, or have
terrified men into obedience and service, but those whose hearts were
touched by dreams of impossible beauty, and who have taught us to be
kind and compassionate and tender-hearted, to love God and our
neighbour, and to detect, however faintly, the hope of peace and joy
which binds us all together.

And thus if emotion, by which I mean the power of loving, is the one
thing which survives, the fears which may remain will be concerned with
all the thoughts which cloud love, the anger and suspicion that divide
us; so that perhaps the only fears which will survive at all will be
the fears of our own selfishness and coldness, that inner hardness
which has kept us from the love of God and isolated us from our
neighbour. The pride which kept us from admitting that we were wrong,
the jealousy that made us hate those who won the love we could not win,
the baseness which made us indifferent to the