Observe, again, that the tree lives only while new shoots are produced upon it. The new twigs and leaves not only procure sustenance for themselves, but even keep the trunk itself alive: so that the chief order of support is just opposite what it seems; and the tree lives from above, down,--as do men and all other creatures. So in history, it requires a vast amount of original thought or sentiment to sustain the old structural forms. This gigantic baobab of Catholicism, for example, is kept alive by the conversion of Life into Belief, which takes place age after age in the bosoms of women and men. The trunk was long ago in extensive decay; every wind menaces it with overthrow; but the hearts that bud and blossom upon it yearly send down to the earth and up to the sky such a claim for resource as surrounds the dying trunk with ever new layers of supporting growth. Equally are the thought, poetry, rhetoric of by-gone times kept in significance by the perceiving, the imagining, and the sense of a flowing symbolism in Nature, which our own time brings to them. To make Homer alive to this age,--what an expenditure of imagination, of pure feeling and penetration does it demand! Let the Homeric heart or genius die out of mankind, and from that moment the "Iliad" is but dissonance, the long melodious roll of its echoes becomes a jarring chop of noises. What chiefly makes Homer great is the vast ideal breadth of relationship in which he establishes human beings. But he in whose narrow brain is no space for high Olympus and deep Orcus,--he whose coarse fibre never felt the shudder of the world at the shaking of the ambrosial locks, nor a thrill in the air when a hero fails,--what can this grand stoop of the ideal upon the actual world signify to him? To what but an ethical genius in men can appeal for guest-rites be made by the noble "Meditations" of Marcus Antoninus, or the exquisite, and perhaps incomparable, "Christian Morals" of Sir Thomas Browne? Appreciative genius is centrally the same with productive genius; and it is the Shakspeare in men alone that prints Shakspeare and reads him. So it is that the works of the masters are, as it were, perpetually re-written and renewed in life by the genius of mankind.