All great thinkers live and move on a high plane of thought. It is only there they can breathe freely. It is only in contact with spirits like themselves they can live harmoniously and attain that serenity which comes from ideal companionship. The studies of all great thinkers must range along the highest altitudes of human thought. I have always thought that the strongest argument in favour of the Baconian theory was, that no man, however indubitable his genius, could have written the plays and sonnets that have come down to us under Shakespeare's own name who had not the liberal education of Bacon. The magnificent ideals that have ever haunted the human mind and given us our highest proofs of a future immortality by reason of the impossibility of their fulfilment here, are splintered into atoms by contact with life's realities. Hence comes our sublime discontent. A habitual mediation on the vast problems that underline human life and are knit into human destinies- thoughts of immortality, of the littleness of mere man, of the greatness of man's soul, of the splendors of the universe that are invisible to the ordinary traffickers in the street, as the vastness of St. Peter's is to the spider that weaves her web in a corner of the dome- these things do not fitmen to understand the average human being, or tolerate with patience the sordid wretchedness of the unregenerated masses. It is easy to understand, therefore, why such thinkers fly to the solitude of their own thoughts, or the silent companionship of the immortals and if they care to present their views in prose or verse to the world, that these views take a sombre and melancholy setting from "the pale caste of thought" in which they were engendered.
Immortality is the crucial idea constantly being explored by
