"Wait
The slow and sober uprise all around
O' the building,"

but

"Ran up right to roof
A sudden marvel, piece of perfectness."[A]

[Footnote A:_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau._]

After Puritanism came Charles the Second and the rights of the flesh,
which rights were gradually clarified, till they contradicted themselves
in the benevolent self-seeking of altruistic hedonism. David Hume led
the world out of the shadow of eternity, and showed that it was only an
object of the five senses; or of six, if we add that of "hunger." The
divine element was explained away, and the proper study of mankind was,
not man, as that age thought, but man reduced to his beggarly
elements--a being animated solely by the sensuous springs of pleasure
and pain, which should properly, as Carlyle thought, go on all fours,
and not lay claim to the dignity of being moral. All things were reduced
to what they seemed, robbed of their suggestiveness, changed into
definite, sharp-edged, mutually exclusive particulars. The world was an
aggregate of isolated facts, or, at the best, a mechanism into which
particulars were fitted by force; and society was a gathering of mere
individuals, repelling each other by their needs and greed, with a ring
of natural necessity to bind them together. It was a fit time for
political economy to supplant ethics. There was nowhere an ideal which
could lift man above his natural self, and teach him, by losing it, to