They may not
persist in developed manhood; but if youth has never drawn heaven and
earth together in its imaginations, manhood will ever be
undistinguished. This book only begins a meditation in which, I hope,
nobler imaginations and finer intellects than mine will join hereafter,
and help to raise the soul of Ireland nigher to the ideal and its body
nigher to its soul.
II.
The building up of a civilization is at once the noblest and the most
practical of all enterprises, in which human faculties are exalted to
their highest, and beauties and majesties are manifested in multitude as
they are never by solitary man or by disunited peoples. In the highest
civilizations the individual citizen is raised above himself and made
part of a greater life, which we may call the National Being. He enters
into it, and it becomes in oversoul to him, and gives to all his works a
character and grandeur and a relation to the works of his fellow-
citizens, so that all he does conspires with the labors of others for
unity and magnificence of effect.
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