Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/16

4 nothing obscures the calm and clear view like that. In the other case this element scarcely existed. There is only one standard by which we can attempt to judge any serious writer, and that is by the highest and best which we know of. The judgment we may hold of Lord Tennyson now may be hopelessly irreconcilable with that which we held once, if judgment it could be called, and not the blind acceptance of the enthusiasm of the generation that immediately preceded us. But so is our judgment of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Byron and Shelley and Keats. Them also we accepted blindly as such or such or such, and it was not until we had turned back upon those guides and companions of our spiritual pilgrimage, after their power of leadership had been tested by the agony of the first hard stages, that we realised how they were to appear to us for the large remainder of the way. That same realisation came at that same period with regard also to others beside the older ones. The names of these others are the foremost names of our time, and we instinctively recognise the fact that all of them, those who went before and those who followed after, form but one company. They do. They form the company of the Age of Transition. They close the epoch. They pass the lamp of life to the New Race. They pause on the threshold of the New