We, in our day, are fortunate in so far that we are the inheritors of the splendid work accomplished in the youth and prime of all that we know of civilization. No doubt there were immense periods beyond our ken, in which the entire round of birth, youth, maturity, age and death, was fulfilled by countless civilizations whose histories are unrecorded--but we can only form the faintest guess at this, through the study of old dynasties which, ancient as they are, may perhaps be almost modern compared to the unknown empires which have utterly passed away beyond human recovery. But if we care to examine the matter, we shall find among all nations, that as soon as a form of civilization has emerged from barbarism, like a youth emerging from childhood, it has entered on its career with a glad heart and a poetic soul,--full of ideals, and richly endowed with that gift of the gods--Imagination. It has invariably expressed itself as being reverently conscious of the Highest source of all creation; and its utterance through all its best work and achievement can be aptly summed up in Wordsworth’s glorious lines:-- Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting-- The Soul that rises with us, our life’s star Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar,-- Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God who is our home! While these “trailing clouds of glory” still cling to the soul, the limits of this world,--the mere dust and grime of material things,--do not and cannot satisfy it; it must penetrate into a realm which is of its own idea and innate perception. There it must itself create a universe, and find expression for its higher thought. To this resentful attitude of the soul against mere materialism, we owe all art, all poetry, all music. Every great artistic work performed outside the needs of material and physical life may be looked upon as a spiritual attempt to break open the close walls of our earthly prison-house and let a glimpse of God’s light through.