A genuine love of your own time is the recognition, in what you meet in it, of those best moments which crave to be made accessible even for the remotest of ages following. To immortalize any given moment, however, is to take it out of the temporary and somehow to find a language for it so general in its appeal that hereafter it may preserve in its own significance the trivial circumstances from which it first arose. Whenever a genuine love of life stirs the artist, it will be a passion for what he thinks is the best in his own day; even if he is antiquarian and takes for object of his devotion some medieval phase of life, it is medievalism in his own day that he worships. Such a passion leads the writer toward the future, for since it is an ideal passion, yet to be realized, he instinctively proclaims it to posterity, or tries to; but in his search for the right language in which to utter it, he as instinctively turns to the past. To cultivate the contemporary in art is therefore as absurd as to waste effort cultivating the natural, for the present, like nature, is always with us; but the problem for the artist is to express a vision which necessarily points toward the future in language which necessarily trails from the past. We cannot remind ourselves too often that even the single words of common speech must be used by each one of us perhaps a lifetime before they are charged with emotions or sharpened to precise meanings, and before the writer can use them with full effect they must be so charged and sharpened for all his readers. The language of poetry, moreover, is far more than single words; it is chiefly the metaphors and the legends, the characters and the episodes, which the race has met with so often that at last they suggest accurately to all men the same feelings and the same thoughts. Life at each moment may be on its way to become something to talk with, but only the rash would try to express a serious ideal through a picture of that life which is still near us, and therefore still imperfectly seasoned or digested. The patriotism that Shakespeare dramatized for his audience was certainly a passion for the England of Elizabeth; that is why he expressed it through Faulconbridge, the child of Richard the Lion-Hearted, or through John of Gaunt, or through Henry V. Why did he not put Elizabeth on his stage, with Raleigh and Spenser and Drake and Sidney? Was he blind to the glory of his own hour? He seems not to have been so, but in his own hour neither the Queen nor any of her great courtiers was as clear a figure to the emotions as time has since made them all; the sentiment of the audience would be divided as to each one of them, the adherents to Rome still perhaps cursing Henry’s daughter in their hearts, the friends of Ireland perhaps cursing the poet of the _Faerie Queene_. But the wise dramatist was on safe ground, he knew, when the audience heard their common love of country issue unprejudiced from