nobler lines of evolution, and to open a new order of ages, expires in debauchery, weakness, degeneracy, physical and moral death.  The worst fate you could wish a man is genius without moral strength.  It wrecks individuals, and it wrecks nations.  I said we stand now on an isthmus of time; fifth-century Greece stood on such another.  For reasons that we have seen, there was to be a radical difference between the ages that preceded, and the ages that followed it; its influence was not to wear out, in the west, for twenty-five hundred years.  It was to give a keynote, in cultural effort, to a very long future.  So all western ages since have suffered because of its descent from lofty ideals to vulgar greed and ambition; from Aristides to Themistocles and Pericles.  We shall see this Athenian descent in literature, in art, in philosophy.  If Athens had gone up, not down, European history would have been a long record of the triumphs of the spirit:—­not, as it has been in the main, one of sorrow and disaster.

At the beginning of the Greek age in literature, we find the stupendous figure of Aeschylus.  For any such a force as he was, there is—­how shall I say?—­a twofold lineage or ancestry to be traced:  there are no sudden creations.  Take Shakespeare, for example.  There was what he found read to his hand in English literature; and what he brought into England out of the Unknown.  In his outwardness, the fabric of his art—­we can trace this broad river back to a thinnish stream by the name of Chaucer; or he was growth, recognizably, of the national tree of which Chaucer was the root, or lay at the root.  The unity called English poetry had grown naturally from that root to this glorious flower:  the sparkle, with, brightness, and above all large hold upon the other life that one finds in Shakespeare—­one finds at least the rudiments of them in Chaucer also.  But there is another, an exoteric element in him which one finds nowhere in English literature before him:  the Grandeur from within, the high Soul Symbol.  In him suddenly that portentous thing appears, like a great broad river emerging from the earth.—­Of which we do not say, however, that they have had no antecedent rills and fountain; we know that they have traveled long beneath the mountains, unseen; they sank under the earth-surface somewhere, and are not special new creations.  Looking back behind Shakespeare, from this our eminence in time, we can see beyond the intervening heights this broad water shine again over the plain in Dante; and beyond him some glimmer of it in Virgil; until at last we see the far-off sheen of it in Aeschylus, very near the backward horizon of time.  We can catch no glimpse of it farther, because that horizon is there.