Even the monuments of
statesmen and conquerors have little power to touch the
imagination, unless some love for humanity, some desire to uplift
and benefit the race, have entered into their schemes and policies.
No, it is rather the soil which covers the bones of dreamers and
visionaries that is sacred yet, prophets and poets, artists and
musicians, those who have seen through life to beauty, and have
lived and suffered that they might inspire and tranquillise human
hearts. The princes of the earth, popes and emperors, lie in
pompous sepulchres, and the thoughts of those who regard them, as
they stand in metal or marble, dwell most on the vanity of earthly
glory. But at the tombs of men like Vergil and Dante, of
Shakespeare and Michelangelo, the human heart still trembles into
tears, and hates the death that parts soul from soul. So that if,
like Dante, we could enter the shadow-land, and hold converse with
the spirits of the dead, we should seek out to consort with, not
those who have subdued and wasted the earth, or have terrified men
into obedience and service, but those whose hearts were touched by
dreams of impossible beauty, and who have taught us to be kind and
compassionate and tender-hearted, to love God and our neighbour,
and to detect, however faintly, the hope of peace and joy which
binds us all together.
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