And this same passion for the infinite is the informing thought of Wagner's tone-dramas and Tschaikowsky's symphonies. Love's mystery is deepened by the mystery of death, and its splendour has an added touch by the breath of the grave. The desire of the infinite greatens the beauty of the finite and lights its sanctuary with a supernatural radiance. All knowledge there becomes wonder. Truth is not known, but the soul is there in very deed possessed by the Truth, and is one with it eternally. Ibsen's protest against limited horizons, against theorists, formulists, social codes, conventions, derives its justice from the worthlessness of those conventions, codes, theories, in the light of the infinite. The achievements in art most distinctive of the present age--the paintings of Courbet, Whistler, Degas, for instance--proclaim the same creative principle, the unsubstantiality of substance, the immateriality of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed, the unreality of all things, save that which was once the emblem of unreality, the play of line and colour, and their impression upon the retina of the eye. "If I live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw a line," said Hokousai. It was as if he had said, "I shall be able to create a world." The pressing effects of Imperialism in such an environment, its swift influences upon the life of an age thus conditioned, thus sharply defined from all preceding ages, are of an import which it would be hard to over-estimate. The nation undowered with such an ideal, menaced with extinction or with a gradual depression to the rank of a protected nationality, passes easily, as in France and Holland and in the higher grades of Russian society, to the side of political and commercial indifferentism, of artistic or literary cosmopolitanism. But to a race dowered with the genius for empire, it rescues politics from the taint of local or transient designs, and imparts to public affairs and the things of State that elevation which was their characteristic in the Rome of Virgil and the England of Cromwell. For not only the life of the individual, but the life of States, is by this conception robed in something of its initial wonder. These, the individual and the State, as we have seen, are but separate phases, aspects of one thought, that thought which in the Universe is realized.