practically, however, Arnold found it necessary neither to turn away nor to be silent. There was yet another solution for sensitive souls: to hide the heart in a nest of roses away from the world, just as Schopenhauer, who in Germany represented in more philosophic vesture this same vague unrest, resolved it by the aid of his profound religious sense in refined and æsthetic joy. That is the solution sought in what seems to me one of the most exquisite and significant books of the century, “Marius the Epicurean.” For Marius, life is made up of a few rare and lovely visions. All the rough sorrow and gladness of the world, its Dantesque bitterness or its Rabelaisian joy, only reaches him through a long succession of mirrors, and every strong human impulse as an attenuated echo. This serious, sweet, and thoughtful book is the summary of the “sensations and ideas” of the finest natures of an era; as in certain of the distinguished opium-eaters of the beginning of the century, Coleridge or De Quincey, we see a refined development of the passive sensory sides of the human organism with corresponding atrophy of the motor sides. It is clearly impossible to go any farther on that road. There is no renascence of the human spirit unless some mighty leverage has been at work long previously. Such forces work underground, slowly and coarsely and patiently, during barren periods, and they meet with much contempt as destructive of man’s finer and higher nature; but, in the end, it is by these that the finer and higher is lifted to new levels. No great spiritual eruption can take place without the aid of such levers. What forces have been at work during the century that is now drawing to a close? Three, I think, stand clearly forth.