A thousand years!  You may count full many a thousand by this route before you are one with divine Philosophy.  Whereas a single flight of brains will reach and embrace her; give you the savour of Truth, the right use of the senses, Reality’s infinite sweetness; for these things are in philosophy; and the fiction which is the summary of actual Life, the within and without of us, is, prose or verse, plodding or soaring, philosophy’s elect handmaiden.  To such an end let us bend our aim to work, knowing that every form of labour, even this flimsiest, as you esteem it, should minister to growth.  If in any branch of us we fail in growth, there is, you are aware, an unfailing aboriginal democratic old monster that waits to pull us down; certainly the branch, possibly the tree; and for the welfare of Life we fall.  You are acutely conscious of yonder old monster when he is mouthing at you in politics.  Be wary of him in the heart; especially be wary of the disrelish of brainstuff.  You must feed on something.  Matter that is not nourishing to brains can help to constitute nothing but the bodies which are pitched on rubbish heaps.  Brainstuff is not lean stuff;—­the brainstuff of fiction is internal history, and to suppose it dull is the profoundest of errors; how deep, you will understand when I tell you that it is the very football of the holiday-afternoon imps below.  They kick it for pastime; they are intelligences perverted.  The comic of it, the adventurous, the tragic, they make devilish, to kindle their Ogygian hilarity.  But—­sharply comic, adventurous, instructively tragic, it is in the interwinding with human affairs, to give a flavour of the modern day reviving that of our Poet, between whom and us yawn Time’s most hollow jaws.  Surely we owe a little to Time, to cheer his progress; a little to posterity, and to our country.  Dozens of writers will be in at yonder yawning breach, if only perusers will rally to the philosophic standard.  They are sick of the woodeny puppetry they dispense, as on a race-course to the roaring frivolous.  Well, if not dozens, half-dozens; gallant pens are alive; one can speak of them in the plural.  I venture to say that they would be satisfied with a dozen for audience, for a commencement.  They would perish of inanition, unfed, unapplauded, amenable to the laws perchance for an assault on their last remaining pair of ears or heels, to hold them fast.  But the example is the thing; sacrifices must be expected.  The example might, one hopes, create a taste.  A great modern writer, of clearest eye and head, now departed, capable in activity of presenting thoughtful women, thinking men, groaned over his puppetry, that he dared not animate them, flesh though they were, with the fires of positive brainstuff.  He could have done it, and he is of the departed!  Had he dared, he would (for he was Titan enough) have raised the Art in dignity on a level with History; to an interest surpassing the narrative of public deeds