Earth and Heaven—­wild attempts at an omniprevalent Democracy were made.  Yet this evil sprang necessarily from the leading evil, Knowledge.  Man could not both know and succumb.  Meantime huge smoking cities arose, innumerable.  Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces.  The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease.  And methinks, sweet Una, even our slumbering sense of the forced and of the far-fetched might have arrested us here.  But now it appears that we had worked out our own destruction in the perversion of our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its culture in the schools.  For, in truth, it was at this crisis that taste alone—­that faculty which, holding a middle position between the pure intellect and the moral sense, could never safely have been disregarded—­it was now that taste alone could have led us gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life.  But alas for the pure contemplative spirit and majestic intuition of Plato!  Alas for the [Greek:  mousichae] which he justly regarded as an all-sufficient education for the soul!  Alas for him and for it!—­since both were most desperately needed, when both were most entirely forgotten or despised [1].  Pascal, a philosopher whom we both love, has said, how truly!—­“Que tout notre raisonnement se reduit a ceder au sentiment;” and it is not impossible that the sentiment of the natural, had time permitted it, would have regained its old ascendency over the harsh mathematical reason of the schools.  But this thing was not to be.  Prematurely induced by intemperance of knowledge, the old age of the world drew near.  This the mass of mankind saw not, or, living lustily although unhappily, affected not to see.  But, for myself, the Earth’s records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization.  I had imbibed a prescience of our Fate from comparison of China the simple and enduring, with Assyria the architect, with Egypt the astrologer, with Nubia, more crafty than either, the turbulent mother of all Arts.  In the history of these regions I met with a ray from the Future.  The individual artificialities of the three latter were local diseases of the Earth, and in their individual overthrows we had seen local remedies applied; but for the infected world at large I could anticipate no regeneration save in death.  That man, as a race, should not become extinct, I saw that he must be “born again.”

And now it was, fairest and dearest, that we wrapped our spirits, daily, in dreams.  Now it was that, in twilight, we discoursed of the days to come, when the Art-scarred surface of the Earth, having undergone that purification which alone could efface its rectangular obscenities, should clothe itself anew in the verdure and the mountain-slopes and the smiling waters of Paradise, and be rendered at length a fit dwelling-place for man:—­for man the Death-purged—­for man to whose now exalted intellect there should be poison in knowledge no more—­for the redeemed, regenerated, blissful, and now immortal, but still for the material, man.

‘Una’.