there is a great and brilliant efflorescence of all
the intellectual, mental, and material part of
his nature. The climax of sensuous perfection
is reached, and then his hold weakens, his
power grows less, and he falls back, through
despondency and satiety, to barbarism. Why
does he not stay on this hill-top he has
reached, and look away to the mountains
beyond, and resolve to scale those greater
heights? Because he is ignorant, and seeing
a great glittering in the distance, drops his
eyes bewildered and dazzled, and goes back
for rest to the shadowy side of his familiar
hill. Yet there is now and then one brave
enough to gaze fixedly on this glittering, and
to decipher something of the shape within it.
Poets and philosophers, thinkers and teachers,--all
those who are the "elder brothers of the
race,"--have beheld this sight from time to
time, and some among them have recognised
in the bewildering glitter the outlines of the
Gates of Gold.

Those Gates admit us to the sanctuary of
man's own nature, to the place whence his
life-power comes, and where he is priest of the
shrine of life. That it is possible to enter here,
to pass through those Gates, some one or two
have shown us. Plato, Shakespeare, and a few
other strong ones have gone through and