Divine than an ever-deepening of the presence of the Divine within the soul. That which in speculation pre-eminently distinguishes the Europe of the nineteenth century from preceding centuries--the gradually increasing dominion of Oriental thought, art, and action--has strengthened this impression. An age mystic in its religion, symbolic in its art, and in its politics apathetic or absolutist, succeeds an age of formal religion, conventional art, and Republican enthusiasm. Goethe in 1809, from the overthrow of dynasties and the crash of thrones, turned to the East and found peace. What were the armies of Napoleon and the ruin of Europe's dream to Háfiz and Sádi, and to the calm of the trackless centuries far behind? The mood of Goethe has become the characteristic of the art, the poetry, the speculation of the century's end. The _bizarre_ genius of Nietzsche, whose whole position is implicit in Goethe's _Divan_, popularized it in Germany. The youngest of literatures, Norway and Russia, reveal its power as vividly as the oldest, Italy and France. It controls the meditative depth of Leopardi, the melancholy of Tourgenieff, the nobler of Ibsen's dramas, and the cadenced prose of Flaubert. It informs the teaching of Tolstoi and the greater art of Tschaikowsky. Goethe, at the beginning of the century, moulded into one the ideals of the Middle Age and of Hellas, and so Wagner at the close, in _Tristan_ and in _Parsifal_, has woven the Oriental and the mediaeval spirit, thought, and passion, the Minnesinger's lays and the mystic vision of the _Upanishads_ into a rainbow torrent of harmony, which, with its rivals, the masterpieces of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikowsky, make this century the Periclean age of Music as the fifteenth was the Periclean age of painting, and the sixteenth of poetry.