THE MSS. OF “THE SEVEN LAMPS” 287

own abuse of an influence whose continuance from the beginning depended, as to the end it must depend, upon the purity and justice with which she enshrined truth and directed emotion. And in nothing more has her forfeiture of her own privileges and betrayal of her mission been more singularly evident than in the constancy with which her words have been dedicated to the setting forth in every colour that could either adorn it or disguise, that worst and wildest phantom of mental hallucination, that most treacherous and subtle dream of all that entrap the unregulated desires of men-Liberty!

“Most subtle indeed of all dreams-and least substantial, for the feeblest ray of reason might show us that not only its attainment but its Being is impossible. There is no such Thing in the Universe, there never can be. The Stars have it not. The Earth has it not. The Sea has it not-the Pestilences and Tempests of the Air have it not! And we men have the mockery and imagination of it sometimes only for our worst and most merciless Punishment.

“In one of the noblest poems, for its imagery and its music, belonging to the recent school of our own Literature, the writer has caught from the contemplation of inanimate nature, the fire which kindles his pain of this wild and fatal abstraction. But with what strange fallacy of Interpretation-for if there be any one principle more widely preached than another-more deeply proved-more strenuously exhibited-more unconditionally and absolutely accepted-by every atom of visible or demonstrable creation; that principle is not Liberty, but Law. And as I have already asserted, and shall afterwards endeavour more certainly to show, while a certain degree of apparent freedom is necessary to admit of the sufficient individuality in the markings and energies of things” [here the draft breaks off; the passage was re-written in the text, see above, pp. 248-249].

“Of the laws belonging to its excellence, and more especially where numbers are to be concerned in its production or practice-the licence which is left to the workings of individual minds is more severely withdrawn. In this respect architecture is greater than other arts-greater in proportion to the severity of her laws: for it is owing to her noble relations with all that is universally important to men: with the daily life, the polity, the history and the religious faith of nations, that it is, and imperatively, a condition of her very existence that she should accept and show forth figured and embodied in her forms and systems-those great principles of Obedience and of Loyalty to which their life owes its happiness-their polity its power-their History its pride, and their Faith its Acceptance.

“Without, therefore, the light of experience-without any aid but that of the simplest evidence of reason-we might firmly conclude ...” [continued as in the text, above, p. 251].

[Version 0.04: March 2008]