the huge mass of Evil, as it rolls and swells, there is ever some Good
working imprisoned; working towards deliverance and triumph?

How such Ideals do realise themselves; and grow, wondrously, from amid
the incongruous ever-fluctuating chaos of the Actual: this is what
World-History, if it teach any thing, has to teach us, How they grow;
and, after long stormy growth, bloom out mature, supreme; then quickly
(for the blossom is brief) fall into decay; sorrowfully dwindle; and
crumble down, or rush down, noisily or noiselessly disappearing. The
blossom is so brief; as of some centennial Cactus-flower, which after
a century of waiting shines out for hours! Thus from the day when rough
Clovis, in the Champ de Mars, in sight of his whole army, had to cleave
retributively the head of that rough Frank, with sudden battleaxe, and
the fierce words, "It was thus thou clavest the vase" (St. Remi's and
mine) "at Soissons," forward to Louis the Grand and his L'Etat c'est
moi, we count some twelve hundred years: and now this the very
next Louis is dying, and so much dying with him!--Nay, thus too, if
Catholicism, with and against Feudalism (but not against Nature and
her bounty), gave us English a Shakspeare and Era of Shakspeare, and so
produced a blossom of Catholicism--it was not till Catholicism itself,
so far as Law could abolish it, had been abolished here.

But of those decadent ages in which no Ideal either grows or blossoms?
When Belief and Loyalty have passed away, and only the cant and false
echo of them remains; and all Solemnity has become Pageantry; and
the Creed of persons in authority has become one of two things: an
Imbecility or a Macchiavelism? Alas, of these ages World-History can
take no notice; they have to become compressed more and more,
and finally suppressed in the Annals of Mankind; blotted out as
spurious,--which indeed they are. Hapless ages: wherein, if ever in any,