Such an alloy there is in nearly all great works even; much in Homer,
something in Virgil, a considerable part of Dante, and an increasing
portion in Milton have this mixture of death in them; but if by keeping
to the primary, the permanent, the universal, they have escaped the
natural body of their age, the substance of the work is still living;
they have achieved such immortality as art allows. They have done so,
not so much by the personal power of their authors as by their
representative character. These ideal works of the highest range, which
embody in themselves whole generations of effort and rise as the
successive incarnations of human imagination, are products of race and
state, of world experience and social personality; they differ, race
from race, civilization from civilization, Hebrew or Greek, Pagan or
Christian, just as on the individual scale persons differ; and they are
solved, as personality in its individual form is solved, in the element
of the common reason, the common nature in the world and man, which they
contain,--in man,

"Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless";

in the unity of the truth of his spirit they are freed from mortality,
they are mutually intelligible and interchangeable, they survive,--
racial and secular states and documents of a spiritual evolution yet
going on in all its stages in the human mass, still barbarous, still
pagan, still Christian, but an evolution which at its highest point
wastes nothing of the past, holds all its truth, its beauty, its vital
energy, in a forward reach.

The nature of the changes which time brings may best be illustrated from
the epic, and thus the opposition of the transient and permanent
elements in art be, perhaps, more clearly shown. Epic action has been