The two leading races, once peopling the southmost peninsulas of Europe, were extinct centuries ago, but their daily tongues survive, dead languages never while endures the world, for they bring to all enlightened peoples the period and climax of the orator, the meter of the tragic dramatist, and the notes of the Homeric and the Virgilian muse, fresh and unrivalled as when Greece and Italy first lent ear. There have been schools of architecture, both Pagan and Christian, schools of sculpture from Phidias onward; schools of modern painting since the mature work of Giotto; and the wise ages, far from selecting and excluding, have preserved them all. To men of creative genius were granted glimpses of Truth; each from his own angle beheld the ineffable vision. Through the sundered veils of illusion, as through the storm's momentary rift, the permitted artist beheld his own ruling star, sometimes a royal sun, sometimes a subordinate planet, but always one without which the hierarchy of heaven were incomplete. That neither the school of Wagner nor that of Strauss will supersede existing national schools is assured for the additional reason that these are the outcome of national ideals. In every race of civilization the man of creative genius proves his people to be possessed of ideals of art peculiarly their own. There results for example the Slavic, the Scandinavian, the English, the German, the Spanish, the French, the Italian ideals, and, lofty in possibilities, that of the amalgamating race destined to fill this ample western land of ours. The ideals of tonal art! Surely the Wagnerian and the Straussian models cannot include them all! Varied as the geography of the globe, as the configurations of its surface, those national ideals are sombre with the solitude of barren steppes; they are gloomy with the twilight of deep-indenting fjords; they are rich with the ancient, the mediæval, the modern, of a land of memories gathered since the coming of Arthur. Otherwhere they are fraught with the romance of Rhenish castles where Minnesingers and Meistersingers have proved the magic power of song; or else they bring the southern night of castinets and tripping feet, and the moonlit wonder of Moorish Alhambra. How well those ideals have embodied the gay and the graceful, also the volatile as the vintage of vine-clad Champagne! And how fitly are they born by Adriatic and Mediterranean shores where the ardent day-beam warms the heart to love's emotion; and, in days to come, shall they not suggest the amplitude of snowy mountain chains, the undulating sweep of prairies, the breezy expanse of vast inland seas, and the eternal dash and roar of ocean on our eastern and our western coasts?