Now that "twilight of the world" following the war perhaps will
witness an _Avatara_--the coming of a World-Teacher who will rebuild
on the one broad and ancient foundation that temple of Truth which
the folly and ignorance of man is ever tearing down. A material
counterpart of that temple will in that case afterward arise. Thus
will be born the architecture of the future; and the ornament of that
architecture will tell, in a new set of symbols, the story of the
rejuvenation of the world.

In this previsioning of architecture after the war, the author
must not be understood to mean that these things will be realized
_directly_ after. Architecture, from its very nature, is the most
sluggish of all the arts to respond to the natural magic of the
quick-moving mind--it is Caliban, not Ariel. Following the war the
nation will be for a time depleted of man-power, burdened with
debt, prostrate, exhausted. But in that time of reckoning will come
reflection, penitence.

"And I'll be wise hereafter,
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool."

With some such epilogue the curtain will descend on the great drama
now approaching a close. It will be for the younger generations, the
reincarnate souls of those who fell in battle, to inaugurate the work
of giving expression, in deathless forms of art, to the vision of that
"fairer world" glimpsed now only as by lightning, in a dream.

[Illustration]