in all effective for a thousand years.  But it came to Persia in the autumn of the great cycle, when the forces it brought had to ripen quickly, and descend at once on to the military (the lowest) plane;—­and to Greece just at noon or early summer,—­just before the most intellectual moment,—­and so there, too, had no time to ripen, but must burst out at once in artistic creation without ever a chance first to work in and affect the moral life of the race.  This last is what Pythagoras at Croton had in mind to do:  had Croton endured, there would have been a stable moral basis for the intellectual spendors.—­I believe that you have here the very archeus and central clue to history.  In China, it was enough for Laotse to float his magical ideas, and for confucius to give out his extremely simple (but highly efficient) philosophy, and to provide his grand Example; in India it was enough for the Lord Buddha to teach his wisdom and to found his Order; he might trust the future to them;—­For Persia, one cannot say:  the facts as to Zoroaster are not enough known; there might seem to have been some failure there too;—­but in Greece, it was imperative that Pythagoras should establish his Lomaland; nothing else could save the forces from squandering themselves at once, in that momentous time, on the intellectual and artistic planes, and leaving life unredeemed and unaffected.

Which indeed they did; and thence on it Europe we see century by century vision waning and the world on a downward path, until the moment comes when a new effort may be made.  Augustus calls a halt then; moves heaven and earth; works like ten Herculeses, along all lines, to bring about an equilibrium in outer affairs; and so far succeeds that in his time one or two men may have the Vision, at any rate:—­Virgil may catch more than glimpses of the Inner Beauty, and leave the outer world a litle less forlorn.  But in place of the rush and fine flow of the Grecian Age, what painful strivings we find in the Augustan!—­When too, Teachers labor to illumine the vastnesses within; Apollonius; Moderatus; shall we add, the Nazarene?—­So the downward tendency is checked; in the following centuries we see a slow pushing upward,—­in the heroic effort of the Stoics, not after Vision—­that was beyond their scope and ken,—­but after at least that which should bring it back,—­a noble method of life.

And then, at last, a dawn eastward:  and the bugles of the Spirits of the Dawn heard above the Pyramids, heard over the shadowy plains where Babylon was of old;—­and out of that yellow glow in the sky come, now that the cycle permits them, masters of the Splendid vision.  They come with something of light from the ancient Mysteries of Egypt; with some shining from Star Plato, and from Pythagoras; and at their coming light up the dark worlds and the intense blue deeps of the sky,—­wherein you can see now, under their guidance, immeasurable and beautiful things to satisfy the highest cravings of