d a view of Olympus.
Then all these present fascinating trivialities of war and diplomacy
ebbed away, like Greece and Rome before them, and there seemed nothing
real in the universe but Plato's archetypal man.

Indeed, it is the same with all contemporary notorieties. In all free
governments, especially, it is the habit to overrate the _dramatis
personae_ of the hour. How empty to us are now the names of the great
politicians of the last generation, as Crawford and Lowndes!--yet it
is but a few years since these men filled in the public ear as large a
space as Clay or Calhoun afterwards, and when they died, the race of the
giants was thought ended. The path to oblivion of these later idols
is just as sure; even Webster will be to the next age but a mighty
tradition, and all that he has left will seem no more commensurate with
his fame than will his statue by Powers. If anything preserves the
statesmen of to-day, it will be only because we are coming to a contest
of more vital principles, which may better embalm the men. Of all gifts,
eloquence is the most short-lived. The most accomplished orator fades
forgotten, and his laurels pass to some hoarse, inaudible Burke,
accounted rather a bore during his lifetime, and possessed of a faculty
of scattering, not convincing, the members of the House. "After all,"
said the brilliant Choate, with melancholy foreboding, "a book is the
only immortality."

So few men in any age are born with a marked gift for literary
expression, so few of this number have access to high culture, so few
even of these have the personal nobleness to use their powers well,
and this small band is finally so decimated by disease and manifold
disaster, that it makes one shudder to observe how little of the
embodied intellect of any age is left behind. Literature is attar of
roses, one distilled drop from a million blossoms. Think how Spain and
Portugal once divided the globe between them in a treaty, when England
was a petty kingdom of illiterate tribes!--and now all Spain is
condensed for us into Cervantes, and all Portugal into the fading fame
of the unread Camoens. The long magnificence of Italian culture has
left us only _I Quattro Poeti_, the Four Poets. The difference between
Shakspeare and his contemporaries is not that he is read twice, ten
times, a hundred times as much as they: it is an absolute difference; he
is read, and they are only printed.

Yet, if our life be immortal, this temporary d