ranscendent natures unless it be quite peradventure. So great
and world-wide a dearth of high utterance attends our age.
Can it be,' he continued, 'we are to accept the common cant
that democracy is the nursing mother of genius, and that great
men of letters flourish and die with it? For freedom, they say,
has the power to cherish and encourage magnanimous minds, and
with it is disseminated eager mutual rivalry and the emulous
thirst to excel. Moreover, by the prizes open under a popular
government, the mental faculties of orators are perpetually
practised and whetted, and as it were, rubbed bright, so that
they shine free as the state itself. Whereas to-day,' he went
on, 'we seem to have learnt as an infant-lesson that servitude
is the law of life; being all wrapped, while our thoughts are
yet young and tender, in observances and customs as in
swaddling clothes, bound without access to that fairest and
most fertile source of man's speech (I mean Freedom) so that we
are turned out in no other guise than that of servile
flatterers. And servitude (it has been well said) though
it be even righteous, is the cage of the soul and a public
prison-house.'

But I answered him thus.--'It is easy, my good sir, and
characteristic of human nature, to gird at the age in which
one lives. Yet consider whether it may not be true that it is
less the world's peace that ruins noble nature than this war
illimitable which holds our aspirations in its fist, and
occupies our age with passions as with troops that utterly
plunder and harry it. The love of money and the love of
pleasure enslave us, or rather, as one may say, drown us
body and soul in their depths. For vast and unchecked
wealth marches with lust of pleasure for comrade, and when
one opens the gate of house or city, the other at once enters
and abides. And in time these two build nests in the hearts
of men, and quickly rear a progeny only too legitimate: and
the ruin within the man is gradually consummated as the
sublimities of his soul wither away and fade, and in ecstatic
contemplation of our mortal parts we omit to exalt, and
come to neglect in nonchalance, that within us which is
immortal.'

I had a friend once who, being in doubt with what picture to
decorate the chimney-piece in his library, cast away choice and
wrote up two Greek words--[Greek: PSYCHES 'IATREION]; that is,
the hospital--the heali