Meantime, let me conclude by asking you to fix your attention for a moment on this figure of Milly, sweet wife of Amos Barton, going to bed with her unmended basket of stockings in great fatigue, yet in great love and trust, and contrast it with that figure of Prometheus, nailed to the Caucasian rock in pain and hate, which formed the first object of these studies. What prodigious spiritual distance we have swept over from the Titan lying down, to unrest, thundering defiance against Jove's thunder, as if clashing shield against shield, and the tender-limbed woman whom the simple narrative puts before us in these words: "Her body was very weary, but her heart was not heavy ...; for her heart so overflowed with love," &c. Fixing your attention upon this word "love," and reminding you how, at the close of the last lecture, we found that the whole movement of the human spirit which we have traced here as the growth of personality towards the unknown--towards fellow-man--towards nature,--resulting in music, in the novel, in science--that this whole movement becomes a unity when we arrive at the fact that it really imparts a complete change in man's most ultimate conception of things--a change, namely, from the conception of Justice as the organic idea of moral order, a conception which we have seen Æschylus and Plato vainly working out to the outrageous conclusions of Prometheus, of the _Republic_; to the conception of Love as the organic idea of moral order, a conception which we are just now to see George Eliot working out to the divinely-satisfactory conclusion of Milly Barton, who conquers with gentle love a world which proved refractory alike to the justice of Jove and the defiance of Prometheus; reminding you, I say, of this concurrent change from feeble personality and justice to strong personality and love, what an amazing arc of progress we have traversed in coming from Æschylus to George Eliot! And it is, finally, most interesting to find this change receiving clear expression, for the first time in English literature, in the works of the two women I have mentioned, Mrs. Browning and George Eliot. In this very autumn, when we have seen the editor of _Blackwood's Magazine_ reading the MS. of George Eliot's first story to Thackeray, Mrs. Browning is sending _Aurora Leigh_ to print; and, as I shall have frequent occasion to point out, the burden of _Aurora Leigh_ as well as of George Eliot's whole cyclus of characters is love. There is a charming scene in the first Act of Bayard Taylor's _Prince Deukalion_, which, though not extending to the height we have reached, yet very dramatically sums up a great number of ideas which converge towards it. In this scene Gæa, the Earth, mother of men, is represented as tenderly meditating upon her son, man. Near her stands a rose-tree, from one bud of which Love is presently to emerge. She says: