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“Had He not turned us in his hand, and thrust

Our high things low and shook our hills as dust,

We had not been this splendor, and our wrong

An everlasting music for the song

Of earth and heaven!”ssss1

Deeds, monuments, cities, and civilizations fade into nothingness, but a few words, or a strain of music turned by an artist, will live on forever. The battle of Gettysburg will become merely a paragraph of history, the causes for which it was fought will be as nothing, but the words spoken by Lincoln will be preserved for all time, not because they were wise, but because they were wise and beautiful.

There is no escape from this condition. An occasional great writer has railed at beauty, only to prove finally that his own permanence depended on it. Carlyle, for example, was more caustic than usual when he discussed poetry. His comment on Browning’s “The Ring and the Book” ran thus: “A wonderful book, one of the most wonderful ever written. I re-read it all through—all made out of an ‘Old Bailey’ story that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting.” Yet the best part of “Sartor Resartus” is its beauty, and there are in “The French Revolution” many passages of quite perfect poetic imagery and characterization without which it would lose much of its value. What we call “Carlyle” is no longer a man; nor is it a philosophy, or a history; it is nothing but a style, a manner of saying things—an individual, characteristic, and strange blend of hard and soft, of high and low, of rugged and tender, all struggling with a Puritanical conscience. So we say that beauty is the lodestone by which all life is tested.