The practical is a very good thing in its way--if it only be not another
name for the worldly. To be absorbed in it is to eat of that insane root
which the soldiers of Antonius found in their retreat from
Parthia--which whoso tasted kept gathering sticks and stones as if they
were some great matter till he died.
One is forced to listen, now and then, to a kind of talk which makes him
feel as if this were the after-dinner time of the world, and mankind
were doomed hereafter forever to that kind of contented materialism
which comes to good stomachs with the nuts and raisins. The dozy old
world has nothing to do now but stretch its legs under the mahogany,
talk about stocks, and get rid of the hours as well as it can till
bedtime. The centuries before us have drained the goblet of wisdom and
beauty, and all we have left is to cast horoscopes in the dregs. But
divine beauty, and the love of it, will never be without apostles and
messengers on earth, till Time flings his hour-glass into the abyss as
having no need to turn it longer to number the indistinguishable ages of
Annihilation. It was a favorite speculation with the learned men of the
sixteenth century that they had come upon the old age and decrepit
second childhood of creation, and while they maundered, the soul of
Shakespeare was just coming out of the eternal freshness of Deity,
"trailing" such "clouds of glory" as would beggar a Platonic year of
sunsets.
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