It is not difficult to prove what I have here asserted of this tendency toward the Real in modern literature and art. Within twenty, nay, within ten years, men of genius have abandoned the Supernatural and the Gothic as affording fit themes for creative efforts. That unfortunate creature the Ghost--especially the Ghost in Armor--as well as the Historical or Sensational personages who live only in the superlative--are at present in general demand only by that harmless class who read 'for entertainment,' and even they are beginning to ungratefully mock their old friends. It is not difficult to foresee that the Romance so dear to the last generation will soon become the exclusive heritage of the vulgar. Meanwhile, genial sketches of fresh, unaffected Nature, draughts from real life, are beginning to be loved with keen zest. What novels are so successful as those in which the writer has truthfully mirrored the heart or the home? What pictures are so loved as those which set before us the Real, or, rather, the Ideal in its true meaning--that of the perfected essence of the Real? When this tendency shall have fairly placed man on the right road--when we shall have learned to follow and set forth Nature as she is, in spirit and in truth, the great cherishing mother, ever young, ever joyous, of all beauty and all pleasure, then we may anticipate the last and greatest era of human culture. Then we may hope for a more than Greek art--an art freed from every strain of oppression and injustice. To effect this we must, however, do what the earliest founders of poetry find mythology did: search Nature closely, bear constantly in mind her one great principle of potent Being, continually displaying itself in all things as life and death, mutually creating each other, and acting in all organic life by the mystery of Love, Then, while establishing those affinities and correspondences between natural objects which constitute Poetry, let it be ever present to the mind that each is, so to speak, always polarized with its positive end of activity, creation or birth, and its negative of cessation, decay and death. It is by the constant _realization_ of this solemn and beautiful truth in all things that Nature eventually appears so strengthening and cheerful. The flower and the fruit, the delight of anticipation and the luxury of realization, are the delightful culmination of every natural existence; and it is to perfect these that all action tends. Decay, disease, pain, and death, are only kindly agencies acting more effectually and rapidly, to sweep away that which is fading, and hasten it into new forms of beauty and pleasure. 'Nature within her placid breast receives All her creation; and the body pays Itself the due of nature, and its end Is self-consummated.'[A] [Footnote A: LUCAN, _Pharsalia_.]