have you before you there?  The activity of the hearts and minds of Englishmen, sending out the force of the life that is in them from the heart that is beating in those tremendous centers to the distances that are only stopt by the most distant frontiers of the world.  Your sayings and thoughts are quoted throughout the markets of Europe—­yes, throughout the markets of other continents; your actions and decisions make the difference between the decisions and the actions of men that you have never seen, that you shall never see.  The Medici were a power in Florence, first as bankers, then as governors.  There are men in London who have power throughout the world, not only in Florence, not as profest governors, but as practical governors through the activity of commercial instinct.  Certainly, it seems to me quite possible that there may be minds carried away by such a great activity; but that great activity I submit to your deeper, quieter English Sunday thought—­that activity will stimulate, will delight, will attract, will intoxicate; one thing it will not do—­I am bold to say it will never satisfy.

And if I may take another instance for a moment, there is this pure intellect, bidding good-by to the political arena, to the commercial strife, saying farewell to the dreams of beauty, and falling back upon the cells of the brain, traversing the corridors of thought, and entering first here and there into that labyrinth of instinct, or association, or accumulative learning.  Certainly, there is a power of a delight that the world can never realize outside the region of the brain.  If that needs proof you have only, dear friends, to meditate upon such lives as Newton, or Shakespeare, or Kepler, or if you turn to the region of meditative thought, to such lives as our own George Eliot—­yes, there is that in the mere exercise of intellect which is intoxicating, which is consoling even to the highest degree.  But intellect, after all, finds its frontier.  I may say of it what I have said of the esthetic sentiment, what I have said of the active sentiment in man:  it attracts, it delights—­what is more, I think it even consoles; but the one thing I find about it that to me is perfectly appalling is that it does not satisfy.

There are many of you perhaps to-day who will demand that I should take my fourth instance, and will ask that that at least may do its duty.  Will it?  There is the region of the affections—­that region wherein we stray in early spring days as pickers of the spring-flowers of our opening life, where suns are always glorious and sunsets only speak of brighter dawn, where poetry is in all ordinary conversation and hope springs to higher heights from hour to hour, where Mays are always Mays and Junes are always Junes, where flowers are ever bursting, and there seems no end to our nosegays, no limit to our imaginations, no fetter to our fancies, no restraint to our desires.  There is the world, the vast, powerful world, of the