not to wear out, in the west, for twenty-five hundred years. It
was to give a keynote, in cultural effort, to a very long future.
So all western ages since have suffered because of its descent
from lofty ideals to vulgar greed and ambition; from Aristides
to Themistocles and Pericles. We shall see this Athenian descent
in literature, in art, in philosophy. If Athens had gone up, not
down, European history would have been a long record of the
triumphs of the spirit:--not, as it has been in the main, one of
sorrow and disaster.

At the beginning of the Greek age in literature, we find the
stupendous figure of Aeschylus. For any such a force as he was,
there is--how shall I say?--a twofold lineage or ancestry to be
traced: there are no sudden creations. Take Shakespeare, for
example. There was what he found read to his hand in English
literature; and what he brought into England out of the Unknown.
In his outwardness, the fabric of his art--we can trace this
broad river back to a thinnish stream by the name of Chaucer; or
he was growth, recognizably, of the national tree of which
Chaucer was the root, or lay at the root. The unity called
English poetry had grown naturally from that root to this
glorious flower: the sparkle, with, brightness, and above all
large hold upon the other life that one finds in Shakespeare--one
finds at least the rudiments of them in Chaucer also. But there
is another, an exoteric element in him which one finds nowhere in
English literature before him: the Grandeur from within, the
high Soul Symbol. In him suddenly that portentous thing appears,
like a great broad river emerging from the earth.--Of which we do
not say, however, that they have had no antecedent rills and
fountain; we know that they have traveled long beneath the