To this larger vision, within which the past supplements the present, the great army of men and women moves to a solemn and appealing music.

The pathos of life touches them with an indescribable dignity; the work of life gives them an unspeakable nobility.

Under the meanest exterior there are one knows not what tragedies of denied hopes and unappeased longings; behind the mask of evil there shines one knows not what struggling virtue overborne by impulses that flow from the past like irresistible torrents.

Hidden under all manner of disguises--weakness, poverty, ignorance, vulgarity--there waits a world of ideals never realised but never lost; the fire of aspiration burns in a thousand thousand souls that are maimed and broken, bruised and baffled, but which still survive.

Is not this the unquenchable spark that some day, in freer air, shall break into white flame?
It is the Imagination only that discerns in a thousand contradictions, a thousand obscurities, the large design to be revealed when the ring of the hammer has ceased, the dust of toil been laid, the scaffolding removed, and the finished structure suddenly discloses the miracle wrought among those who were blind.
VI I might call him A thing divine; for nothing natural I ever saw so noble.
Rosalind was deeply interested in Prospero; and when the Poet and I had talked long and eagerly about him, she often threw into the current some comment or suggestion that gave us quite another and clearer view of his genius and work.