To ponder too curiously the question why a State declines is like pondering too curiously the question why a man dies. In the vicissitudes of States we are on the threshold of the same Mystery as in the vicissitudes of nature and of human life. The tracts and regions governed by cause and effect are behind us. An empire, like a work of art, is an end in itself, but duration in the former is an integral portion or phase of that end. From the concept, "Empire," duration is inseparable, and the extent of that duration is involved in the concept itself. Duration and modes, religious or ethical, are alike determined from within, from the divine thought realizing itself through the individual in the State. The curve of an empire's history is directed by no self-existent, isolated causes. It is a portion of the universe, evading analysis as the beauty of a statue evades analysis, lost in the vastness of nature, in the labyrinths of the soul which created and of the soul which contemplates its perfection. Therefore regret for the fall of an empire, unless, as in the works of a Gibbon or a Tacitus, it aids in transforming the present nearer to the heart's desire, is vain enough. The Eros of Praxiteles and the Athênê of Scopas, like the Cena of Leonardo and the Martyr of Titian, are beyond our reach, and with all our industry we shall hardly recover the ninety tragedies of Aeschylus. But the moment within the soul of the artist which these works enshrined, which by their inception and completion they did but strengthen and prolong, that moment of vision has not passed away. It has become part of the eternal, as the aspirations, fortitudes, heroisms, endurances, great aims which Rome or Hellas impersonates have become part of the eternal. Man, born into a world which was not made for him, is perplexed, until in such moments the end for which he was himself fashioned is revealed. The artist, the hero, and the prophet give of their peace unto the world. Yet is this gift but a secondary thing, and subject to cause, and time, and change.