it insured immortality.  The menaces of despotism, coming from the East, gave birth to the impulses of freedom in the West; and the latter sustained themselves at a more exalted height, in proportion as the former were backed by substantial support.  Subtract anything from that deafening chorus of slaves which follows in the train of Xerxes, and we must by the same amount take from the paeans of aspiring Greece.  Abolish the outlying provinces that acknowledge a forced allegiance to the Persian monarch, or turn out of their course the tributary streams that from every part of Asia swell the current of Eastern barbarism, and there arises the necessity, also, of circumscribing within narrower limits the glories of the Western civilization.  Against the dangers of external invasion, against all the menaces of barbarians, Greece was secure through the forces which by opposition were developed in herself,—­and for so long a period was she secure against herself.  But the very rapidity and decisiveness of her triumphs over the barbarian cut this period short, and cut short also the rising column of Hellenic power.  At the same time that Cimon is finishing up the fleet of Persia, Pericles is preparing for the culmination of Greece.  In all this there seemed nothing final; from the serenity of the Grecian sky, and from the summer silence which inwrapt her statues and Pentelic colonnades, there was heralded the promise of a ceaseless aeon of splendor.  Resting from one mighty effort, and, in the moment of rest, clothing herself in the majesty of beauty, Hellas yet seemed ready to burst forth out of this rest into an effort more gigantic, to be followed by a more memorable rest as the reflex of a destiny more nearly consummated.  But in this promise there was the very hollowness of deception.  Just because the intense strain against external barbarism had relaxed, those elements which common necessity had made tributary to success and triumph began to suffer dissolution; each separate interest became a prominent centre of a distinct political crystallization; and it was in this way that certain elements of barbarism, inherent in Spartan civilization, now for the first time arrayed it in direct opposition to the Athenian.  It was this defection, on the part of Sparta, from the cause of freedom, which cut the world off from those benefits that it was in the power of Greece to confer.  Athens, whatever other faults she may have had, stood ready to extend these benefits.  As she alone had awakened for herself an echo of Hellenic victory in her world of Art, so was she alone prepared, through a world-wide extension of this victory over slavery, to multiply the intellectual reflexes of so splendid a triumph; hers it was to disenthrall and illuminate the world.  And here, where she had a right to look for the cooeperation of all Greece, as hitherto, was she thwarted; here, holding the van in a procession of triumph, which, as carrying forward a glorious disinthralment into Asia and into Egypt,