As we have said, Bach is the great lyric poet of his nation, the first great German genius after the devastating horrors of war. Looming on the sight, or as contemporaries, are Handel, Leibnitz, Wolf, Klopstock, Lessing, and Winckelmann. The modern era, with its philosophy and revolution, has arrived. The domain of thought is enwidened, and the Middle Ages blend and fade in the historic vista of the past. But the modern era commences with these great affirmations in art and poetry. Bach takes the narrative of the Passion, and erects the Cross anew with sympathetic genius of art and love. Handel, as if he had caught Isaiah's prophetic fire, gave to Europe its most beautiful and noble epic, the _Messiah_; and Klopstock, the first of the great line of Germany's modern poets, devoted his genius and labor to the same subject. But with Bach and Handel no miserable conflicting elements of theology sully the conception of the Saviour Christ. These great artists rise to the universal and the true. The highest art is absolute and knows no appeal. It is in harmony with universal law, both spiritual and physical. FOOTNOTES: [28] Naumann. SETTLEMENT OF GEORGIA A.D. 1732 WILLIAM B. STEVENS It was not only the beginning of a new commonwealth, destined to become an important State of the American Union, but also the spirit and purpose which led to it, that made the English colonization of Georgia a great and unique event in the history of this country. Seldom have military and philanthropic achievements been combined in the career of one man. James Oglethorpe was already a distinguished soldier and a member of the English Parliament when in 1732 he sailed with one hundred twenty men and founded Savannah. His express object was the settlement of Georgia, not only as a home for insolvent debtors, who suffered in English jails, but also for persecuted Protestants of the Continent. It was not the least of his services that on his second visit to the future "Empire State of the South" he took with him John and Charles Wesley, whose influence has been so marked among the American people. Prior to the undertaking of Sir Robert Montgomery in 1717, with which Stevens' narrative begins, few white men had visited the Georgia country, which was the home of various Indian tribes. De Soto traversed it on his great westward expedition (1539-1542), but little was known of it when in 1629 it was included in King Charles I's Carolina grant to Sir Robert Heath, or even at the time of the next Carolina grant (1663), when it passed to Monk, Clarendon, and others. Under the later proprietors it became known to Englishmen through such glowing descriptions as naturally aroused an interest in its settlement.