Yes, men of genius; yes, poets, philosophers, historians; yes, giants of that great art of previous ages which is all the light of the past,--O men eternal, the minds of this day salute you, but do not follow you; in respect to you they hold to this law,--to admire everything, to imitate nothing. Their function is no longer yours. They have business with the virility of the human race. The hour which makes mankind of age has struck. We assist, under the full light of the ideal, at that majestic junction of the beautiful with the useful. No actual or possible genius can surpass you, ye men of genius of old; to equal you is all the ambition allowed: but, to equal you, one must conform to the necessities of our time, as you supplied the necessities of yours. Writers who are sons of the Revolution have a holy task. O Homer, their epic poem must weep; O Herodotus, their history must protest; O Juvenal, their satire must dethrone; O Shakespeare, their "thou shalt be king," must be said to the people; O Æschylus, their Prometheus must strike Jupiter with thunderbolts; O Job, their dunghill must be fruitful; O Dante, their hell must be extinguished; O Isaiah, thy Babylon crumbles, theirs must blaze forth with light! They do what you have done; they contemplate creation directly, they observe humanity directly; they do not accept as a guiding light any refracted ray,--not even yours. Like you, they have for their sole starting-point, outside them, universal being: in them, their soul. They have for the source of their work the one source whence flows Nature and whence flows art, the infinite. As the writer of these lines said forty years ago: "The poets and the writers of the nineteenth century have neither masters nor models."[1] No; in all that vast and sublime art of all peoples, in all those grand creations of all epochs,--no, not even thee, Æschylus, not even thee, Dante, not even thee, Shakespeare,--no, they have neither models nor masters. And why have they neither masters nor models? It is because they have one model, Man, and because they have one master, God. [Footnote 1: Preface to "Cromwell."] BOOK III. TRUE HISTORY.--EVERY ONE PUT IN HIS RIGHT PLACE. CHAPTER I. Here is the advent of the new constellation. It is certain that at the present hour that which has been till now the light of the human race grows pale, and that the old flame is about to disappear from the world.