Towards democracy

44 Towards Democracy

Curious! how all the poetry, the formative life, of the scene—the rushing scent of the lime trees, the evening light, the swaying of the foliage, the rustle of feet below,

The yearning threads of the fine lady’s life—how the sympathy of the little public by the fountain—all gathers round this figure.

There was a time when the sympathy and the ideals of men gathered round other figures ;

When the crowned king, or the priest in procession, or —

the knight errant, or the man of letters in his study, were the imaginative forms to which men clung ;

But now before the easy homely garb and appearance of this man as he swings past in the evening, all these others fade -

and grow dim. They come back after all and cling to him.

And this is one of the slowly unfolded meanings of ~

Democracy.

XXXI

The world travels on—and shall travel on.

A few centuries shall not exhaust the meanings of it. In you and me too, inevitably, its meanings wait their unfolding.

No old laws, precedents, combinations of men or weapons, can retard it; no new laws, schemes, combinations, discoveries, can hasten it; but only the new births within the Soul, you and me.

Sacred for this is the Day and sacred is the Night, sacred are Life and Death because, O wonderful, of this!

When Yes has once been pronounced in that region