"A second thing I know. This lesson will have to be learned under penalties. England will either learn it or England also will cease to exist amongst nations. England will either learn to reverence its heroes, and discriminate them from its sham heroes and valets and gas-lighted histories, and to prize them as the audible God's voice amid all inane jargons and temporary market-cries, and say to them with heart loyalty, 'Be ye King and Priest and Gospel and guidance for us,' or else England will continue to worship new and ever new forms of Quackhood and so, with what resiliences and reboundings matter little, go down to the Father of Quacks. Can I dread such things of England? Wretched, thick-eyed, gross-hearted mortals, why will ye worship lies and stuffed cloth suits, created by the ninth parts of men? It is not your purses that suffer, your farm rents, your commerces, your mill revenues--loud as ye lament over these things. No, it is not these alone, but a far deeper than these. It is your _souls_ that lie dead, crushed down under despicable nightmares, atheisms, brain fumes." What is there here but the uncompromising moral attitude and denunciation of the Hebrew seer? What is there but the same stormy phrase, tumultuous almost to chaos? Carlyle is our own era's type of the Hebraic temperament. Behind him follows Ruskin, a Carlyle tempered by the spirit of Hellenic art without the balance of Hellenic calm. In what Ruskin has to say on how we live and think, his sentences are one and all of Grecian form, but the breath they breathe is Hebrew. I read in Swinburne this address to England:-- Oh thou clothed round with raiment of white waves, Thy brave brows brightening through the gray wet air, Thou lulled with sea-sounds of a thousand caves And lit with sea-shine to thine inland lair: Whose freedom clothed the naked souls of slaves And stripped the muffled souls of tyrants bare: O! by the centuries of thy glorious graves, By the live light of th' earth that was thy care, Live! thou must not be dead! Live! let thine armoured head Lift itself to sunward and the fair Daylight of time and man, Thine head republican, With the same splendour on thine helmless hair Within his eyes kept up a light, Who on thy glory gazed away their sacred sight. These verses might almost be the verses of a Greek. And this is true not merely of the art and grace of form; it is equally true of the mental condition of the writer. The sentiment is intellectually just, and the expression is artistically just. Exhortation there is, a certain ardour there is, but it is the sober and restrained ardour of the Greeks; it is not Hebraic. But I read again of how the Armada flies:--