I am often reminded of this early impulse and enthusiasm, but there are occasions when its significance and value become especially clear to me.  It was brought forcibly to my mind several years ago by an hour or two of talk with one who, as truly as any other American, stands as a representative man of culture; one, that is, whose large scholarship has been so completely absorbed that it has enriched the very texture of his mind, and given him the gift of sharing the experience of the race.  It was on an evening when a play of Sophocles was to be rendered by the students of a certain university in which the tradition of culture has never wholly died out, and I led the talk along the lines of the play.  I was rewarded by an hour of such delight as comes only from the best kind of talk, and I felt anew the peculiar charm and power of culture.  For what I got that enriched me and prepared me for real comprehension of one of the greatest works of art in all literature was not information, but atmosphere.  I saw rising about me the vanished life, which the dramatist knew so well that its secrets of conviction and temperament were all open to him; in architecture, poetry, religion, politics, and manners, it was quietly rebuilded for me in such wise that my own imagination was stirred to meet the talker half-way, and to fill in the outlines of a picture so swiftly and skilfully sketched.  When I went to the play I went as a contemporary of its writer might have gone.  I did not need to enter into it, for it had already entered into me.  A man of scholarship could have set the period before me in a mass of facts; a man of culture alone could give me power to share, for an evening at least, its spirit and life.

These personal illustrations will be pardoned, because they bring out in the most concrete way that special quality which marks the possession of culture in the deepest sense.  That quality allies it very closely with genius itself, in certain aspects of that rare and inexplicable gift.  For one of the most characteristic qualities of genius is its power of divination, of sharing alien or diverse experiences.  It is this peculiar insight which puts the great dramatists in possession of the secrets of so many temperaments, the springs of so many different personalities, the atmosphere of such remote periods of time,—­which, in a way, gives them power to make the dead live again; for Shakespeare can stand at the tomb of Cleopatra and evoke not the shade, but the passionate woman herself out of the dust in which she sleeps.  There has been, perhaps, no more luminous example of the faculty of sharing the experience of a past age, of entering into the thought and feeling of a vanished race, than the peculiar divination and rehabilitation of certain extinct phases of emotion and thought which one finds in the pages of Walter Pater.  In those pages there are, it is true, occasional lapses from a perfectly sound method; there is at times a loss of simplicity,