little, but for the draft made upon it by the new growths. It is
_their_ life, it is the relationship which they assert with sun
and rain and all the elements, which is foremost in bringing about even
this result. So it is with the great old literatures, with the old
systems of philosophy and faith. They are simply avenues, or structural
forms, through which succeeding generations of souls come into
conversation with eternal Nature, and express their original life.

Observe, again, that the tree lives only while new shoots are produced
upon it. The new twigs and leaves not only procure sustenance for
themselves, but even keep the trunk itself alive: so that the chief
order of support is just opposite what it seems; and the tree lives
from above, down,--as do men and all other creatures. So in history, it
requires a vast amount of original thought or sentiment to sustain the
old structural forms. This gigantic baobab of Catholicism, for example,
is kept alive by the conversion of Life into Belief, which takes place
age after age in the bosoms of women and men. The trunk was long ago in
extensive decay; every wind menaces it with overthrow; but the hearts
that bud and blossom upon it yearly send down to the earth and up to
the sky such a claim for resource as surrounds the dying trunk with
ever new layers of supporting growth. Equally are the thought, poetry,
rhetoric of by-gone times kept in significance by the perceiving, the
imagining, and the sense of a flowing symbolism in Nature, which our
own time brings to them. To make Homer alive to this age,--what an
expenditure of imagination, of pure feeling and penetration does it
demand! Let the Homeric heart or genius die out of mankind, and from
that moment the "Iliad" is but dissonance, the long melodious roll of
its echoes becomes a jarring chop of noises. What chiefly makes Homer
great is the vast ideal breadth of relationship in which he establishes
human beings. But he in whose narrow brain is no space for high