It is imperishable, because it is the product of the play of the imagination on the realities of life; and until the imagination perishes, the vision of the ultimate perfection will form and reform in the heart of every generation.

It is the inspiration of every art, the end of every noble occupation, the secret hope of every fine character.
Idealism in this sense, not as the product of an easy and ignorant optimism turning away from the facts of life, but as the product of a large and spiritual dealing with those facts, is the very soul, not only of noble living, but of those noble expressions of life which the greater writers have given us.

They disclose wide diversity of gifts, but they have this in common,--that, in discovering to us the spiritual order of the facts of life, they disclose also those ideal figures which the race accepts as embodiments of its secrets, hopes, and aims.

It is a significant fact that, in portraying the Greek of his time, Homer has given us also the ideal Greek and the Greek ideals.

His insight went to the soul of the persons he described, and he struck into that spiritual order in which the ideal is not only a reality, but, in a sense, the only reality.
Cervantes, in the very act of destroying a false Idealism, conventionally conceived and treated, made one of the most beautiful revelations of a true Idealism which the world has yet received.
Shakespeare's presentation of the facts of life is, on the whole, the most comprehensive and impressive which has yet been made; in the disclosure of tragic elements it is unsurpassed; and yet what a host of ideal figures move through the plays and invest them with a light beyond the glow of art! In the Forest of Arden and on Prospero's Island there live, beyond the touch of time and the vicissitudes of fate, those gracious and beautiful spirits in whom the race sees its noblest hopes come true, its instinctive faith in itself justified.
These spirits are not airy nothings, woven of the unsubstantial gossamer of which dreams are made; they are born of a deep insight into the possibilities of the soul, and a rational faith in their reality.