On the other hand, there have been centuries in which purest intellect and beauty reigned supreme, though the soul lay unrevealed. Thus it was far from Greece and Rome, and from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France. (As regards this last, however, we may perhaps be speaking only of the surface; for in its depths many mysteries lie concealed—we must remember Claude de Saint-Martin, Cagliostro—who is passed over too lightly—Pascalis, and many others besides.) Something is lacking, we know not what; barriers are stretched across the secret passages; the eyes of beauty are sealed. Well-nigh hopeless, indeed, is the attempt to convey this in words, or to explain why the atmosphere of divinity and fatality that enwraps the Greek dramas does not seem to us to be the true atmosphere of the soul. Majestic and all-abiding as is the mystery that lingers on the horizon of these matchless tragedies, it is yet not the pitiful, brotherly mystery, quickened into profound activity, that we find in other works less great and less beautiful. And to come nearer to our own time—though Racine may indeed be the unerring poet of the woman’s heart, who would dare to claim for him that he has ever taken one step towards her soul? What can you tell me of the soul of Andromache, of Britannicus? Racine’s characters have no knowledge of themselves beyond the words by which they express themselves, and not one of these words can pierce the dykes that keep back the sea. His men and women are alone, fearfully alone, on the surface of a planet that no longer revolves in the heavens. If they were to be silent, they would cease to be. They have no _invisible principle_, and one might almost believe that some isolating substance had crept between their spirit and themselves, between the life which has its roots in every created thing and that which, for one fleeting moment, brushes against a passion, a grief or a hope. Truly there are centuries in which the soul lies dormant and slumbers undisturbed.