“Excessive devotion to the material is the evil of our epoch; hence a certain sluggishness.
“The great problem is to restore to the human mind something of the ideal. Whence shall we draw the ideal? Wherever it is to be found. The poets, the philosophers, the thinkers, are its urns.
“The ideal is in Æschylus, in Isaiah, in Juvenal, in Alighieri, in Shakspere. Throw Æschylus, throw Isaiah, throw Juvenal, throw Dante, throw Shakspere into the deep soul of the human race.
“Pour Job, Solomon, Pindar, Ezekiel, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Theocritus, Plautus, Lucretius, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Catulus, Tacitus, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Tertullian, Petrarch, Pascal, Milton, Descartes, Corneille, La Fontaine, Montesquieu, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Sedaine, André Chenier, Kant, Schiller—pour all these souls into man.”