nation in it; and yet it is a kind of haughty
resignation. As if he said: We are miserable; there is nothing
else to be but miserable; let us be silent, and make no fuss
about.--It is the restraint--a very Greek quality--the depth
hinted at, but never wailed over or paraded at all--that make in
these cases his grand manner. His attitude is, I think, nearer
the Teutonic than the Celtic:--his countrymen, like the Teutons,
were accustomed to the pralaya, the long racial night. But he
and the Celts achieved the grand manner, which the Teutons did
not. His eyes, like Llywarch's or Oisin's, were fixed on a past
glory beyond the nightfall.

But where does this Homeric mood lead us? To no height of truth,
I think. Katherine Tingley gave us a keynote for the literature
of the future and the grandest things it should utter,--for the
life, the art, the poetry of a coming time that shall be
Theosophical, that is, lit with the splendor and beauty of the
Soul--when she spoke that high seeming paradox that "Life is
Joy." Let us uncover the real Life; all this sorrow is only the
veil that hides it. God knows we see enough of the veil; but
the poet's business is to tear it down, rend it asunder, and show
the brightness which it hides. If the personality were all, and
a man's whole history were bounded by his cradle and his grave;
then you had done all, when you had presented personalities in
all their complexity, and made your page teem with the likenesses
of living men, and only shown the Beyond, the Governance, as
something unknowable, adverse and aloof. But the Greater Part of
a man is eternal, and each of his lives and deaths but little
incidents in a vast and glorious pilgrimage; and when it is
understood that this is the revelation to be made, this grandeur
the thing to be shadowed forth, criticism will have entered upon
its true path and mission.

I find no such Soul-symbol in the Iliad: the passion and
spiritual concentration of whose author, I think, was only enough
to let him see this outward world: personalities, with their
motive-springs of action within themselves: his greatness, his
sympathy, his compassion, revealed all that to him; but he
lacked vision for the Meanings. I found him then less than
Shakespeare: whose clear knowledge of human personalities--
ability to draw living men--was but incidental and an instrument;
who but took the tragedy of life by the way, as he went to set
forth the whole st