refusing to contend with the Napoleons and Czsars of the "impious younger world."
In patient deep disdain;
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again.
What if, like the saints and martyrs whose heroic spirit really touched his imagination, he had declined the handful of silver, the riband to stick in his coat, and had undertaken the spiritual recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, a mission with which his Tancred trifles? "Strange power of the world," he exclaims with the insight of one who has yielded to it, "that the moment we enter it, our great conceptions dwarf!" Sympathy with the world dwarfs our dream in youth. The "sense of the ridiculous" dwarfs it in age. There was too much of Lucian, too much of Voltaire, too much of Don Juan, too much of Heine, and, above all, too much of the hard radical realism of Napoleon in Disraeli, for a saint. At the end of every aspiring flight, he returns to earth; he takes his stand on human nature as it is, not as the dreamer conceives it ought to be. And he concludes, with a richly experienced smile: "Perhaps these reveries of solitude may not be really great conceptions; perhaps they are only exaggerations; vague, indefinite, shadowy, founded on no sound principles, founded on no assured basis." Perhaps the world is right; and the beatific vision, only a dyspeptic dream.
