Here this political Will and Testament abruptly breaks off. It is rough, inchoate, almost as uncouth as one of Cromwell’s speeches, but the central idea glows luminous throughout. Mr. Rhodes has never to my knowledge said a word, nor has he ever written a syllable, that justified the suggestion that he surrendered the aspirations which were expressed in this letter of 1891. So far from this being the case, in the long discussions which took place between us in the last years of his. life, he re-affirmed as emphatically as at first his unshaken conviction as to the dream—if you like to call it so—or vision, which had ever been the guiding star of his life. How pathetic to read to-day the thrice expressed foreboding that life would not be spared him to carry out his great ideal. But it may be as Lowell sang of Lamartine:—
Time was not granted? Aye in history,
Like that Dawn’s face which baffled Angelo,
Left shapeless, grander for its mystery,
Thy great Design shall stand, and day
Flood its blind front from Orients far away.
