centuries, the devotion to a supernatural and extramundane aim has been
engendering, as a recent writer has observed with indignation, a
degrading '_pessimism as to the essential dignity of man_,'[3] the world
which we have been to a certain extent disregarding has been changing
its character for us. In a number of ways, whilst we have not been
perceiving it, its objective grandeur has been dwindling; and the
imagination, when again called to the feat, cannot reinvest it with its
old gorgeous colouring. Once the world, with the human race, who were
the masters of it, was a thing of vast magnitude--the centre of the
whole creation. The mind had no larger conceptions that were vivid
enough to dwarf it. But now all this has changed. In the words of a
well-known modern English historian, _'The floor of heaven, inlaid with
stars, has sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and
the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, is seen to be but
a small atom in the awful easiness of the universe.'_[4] The whole
position, indeed, is reversed. The skies once seemed to pay the earth
homage, and to serve it with light and shelter. Now they do nothing, so
far as the imagination is concerned, but spurn and dwarf it. And when we
come to the details of the earth's surface itself, the case is just the
same. It, in its extent, has grown little and paltry to us. The wonder
and the mystery has gone from it. A Cockney excursionist goes round it
in a holiday trip; there are no

_Golden cities, ten months journey deep,
In far Tartarian wilds_;[5]

nor do the confines of civilisation, melt as they once did, into any
unknown and unexplored wonderlands. And thus a large mass of sentiment
that was once powerful in the world is now rapidly dwindling, and, so
far as we can see, there is nothing that can ever exactly replace it.