varied natural gifts did but concentrate themselves now and then to an
effective centre, that they might be dissipated again, towards every
side, in daring adventure alike of action and of thought. Variety and
novelty of experience, further quickened by a consciousness trained to
an equally nimble power of movement, individualism, the capacities, the
claim, of the individual, forced into their utmost play by a ready
sense and dexterous appliance of opportunity,--herein, certainly, lay
at least one half of their vocation in history. The material
conformation of Greece, a land of islands and peninsulas, with a range
of sea-coast immense as compared with its area, and broken up by
repellent lines of mountain this way and that, nursing jealously a
little township of three or four thousand souls into an independent
type of its own, conspired to the same effect. Independence, local and
personal,--it was the Greek ideal!

[24] Yet of one side only of that ideal, as we may see, of the still
half-Asiatic rather than the full Hellenic ideal, of the Ionian ideal
as conceived by the Athenian people in particular, people of the coast
who have the roaming thoughts of sailors, ever ready to float away
anywhither amid their walls of wood. And for many of its admirers
certainly the whole Greek people has been a people of the sea-coast.
In Lacedaemon, however, as Plato and others thought, hostile,
inaccessible in its mountain hollow where it had no need of any walls
at all, there were resources for that discipline and order which
constitute the other ingredient in a true Hellenism, the saving Dorian
soul in it. Right away thither, to that solemn old mountain village,
now mistress of Greece, he looks often, in depicting the Perfect City,
the ideal state. Perfection, in every case, as we may conceive, is
attainable only through a certain combination of opposites, Attic
aleipha with the Doric oxos;+ and in the Athens of Plato's day, as he