is age-long; it does not harden into accepted dogma; and it is thus
ceaselessly tossed because it belongs in that sphere of our warring
nature where conflict is perpetual. It goes on in the lives as well as
on the lips of men. It is a question how to live as well as how to
express life. Each race uses its own tongue, each age its dialect; but,
change the language as man may, he ever remains the questioner of his
few great thoughts.

The defenders of the soul inherit an old cause that links them together
in a long descent; but the battle is always to a present age.
Continually something is becoming superfluous, inapplicable, or wanting
in the work of the past. Victory itself makes arms useless, and consigns
them to dark closets. New times, new weapons, is the history of all
warfare. The doubt of the validity of the ideal, never absent from any
intellectual period, is active on all sides, and in more than one
quarter passes into denial. Literature and the other arts of expression
suffer throughout the world. To that point is it come that those of the
old stock who believe that the imagination exercises man's faculty at
its highest pitch, and that the method of idealism is its law, are bid
step down, while others more newly grounded in what belongs to
literature possess the city; but seeing the shrines interdicted, the
obliteration of ancient names, the heroes' statues thrown down, shall
we learn what our predecessors never knew--to abdicate and abandon? I
hear in the temples the footsteps of the departing gods--

Di quibus imperium hoc steterat;

but no; for our opponents are worse off than those of whom it was said
that though one rose from the dead they would not believe,--Plato, being
dead, yet speaks, Shakspere treads our boards, and (why should I