I know John Eglinton, one of our most thoughtful writers, our first
cosmopolitan, thinks that "these ancient legends refuse to be taken
out of their old environment." But I believe that the tales which
have been preserved for a hundred generations in the heart of the
people must have had their power, because they had in them a core
of eternal truth. Truth is not a thing of today or tomorrow.
Beauty, heroism, and spirituality do not change like fashion, being
the reflection of an unchanging spirit. The face of faces which
looks at us through so many shifting shadows has never altered the
form of its perfection since the face of man, made after its image,
first looked back on its original:

For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.

These dreams, antiquities, traditions, once actual, living, and
historical, have passed from the world of sense into the world of
memory and thought: and time, it seems to me, has not taken away
from their power, nor made them more remote from sympathy, but has
rather purified them by removing them from earth to heaven: from
things which the eye can see and the ear can hear they have become
what the heart ponders over, and are so much nearer, more familiar,
more suitable for literary use than the day they were begotten. They
have now the character of symbol, and, as symbol, are more potent
than history. They have crept through veil after veil of the manifold
nature of man; and now each dream, heroism, or beauty has laid itself
nigh the divine power it represents, the suggestion of which made it
first beloved: and they are ready for the use of the spirit, a