There comes the old idle dream: balance of mind and body, perfect
physical health combined with the fulness of intellectual vigour. Why
should I not be there in the harvest field, if so it pleased me, yet none
the less live for thought? Many a theorist holds the thing possible, and
looks to its coming in a better time. If so, two changes must needs come
before it; there will no longer exist a profession of literature, and all
but the whole of every library will be destroyed, leaving only the few
books which are universally recognized as national treasures. Thus, and
thus only, can mental and physical equilibrium ever be brought about.

It is idle to talk to us of "the Greeks." The people we mean when so
naming them were a few little communities, living under very peculiar
conditions, and endowed by Nature with most exceptional characteristics.
The sporadic civilization which we are too much in the habit of regarding
as if it had been no less stable than brilliant, was a succession of the
briefest splendours, gleaming here and there from the coasts of the
Aegean to those of the western Mediterranean. Our heritage of Greek
literature and art is priceless; the example of Greek life possesses for
us not the slightest value. The Greeks had nothing alien to study--not
even a foreign or a dead language. They read hardly at all, preferring
to listen. They were a slave-holding people, much given to social
amusement, and hardly knowing what we call industry. Their ignorance was
vast, their wisdom a grace of the gods. Together with their fair
intelligence, they had grave moral weaknesses. If we could see and speak
with an average Athenian of the Periclean age, he would cause no little
disappointment--there would be so much more of the barbarian in him, and
at the same time of the decadent, than we had anticipated. More than
possibly, even his physique would be a disillusion. Leave him in that
old world, which is precious to the imagination of a few, but to the