possibilities which the
future will ever be defining.

In this sense, the book, almost alone among novels, consists with the
hope of immortality. In average novels, there is nothing left of the
hero when the book ends. "He is utterly married," as "Eothen" says.
Utterly, sure enough! He ends at the altar, like a burnt-out candle over
which the priest puts an extinguisher to keep it from smoking. One yawns
over the last page, not considering himself any longer in company. Think
of giving perpetuity to such lives! What could they do but get
unmarried, and begin fussing at courtship again? But when Goethe's
characters leave the stage, they seem to be rather entering upon life
than quitting it; possibility opens, expectation runs before them, and
our interest grows where observation ceases.

Goethe looks at Personality as through a telescope, and sees it shade
away, beyond its cosmic systems, into star-dust and shining nebulae; he
inspects it as with a microscope, and on that side also resolves it only
in part. He brings to it all the most spacious, all the most delicate
interpretations of his wit, yet confessedly leaves more beyond.

Now it is this large-eyed, liberal regard of man, this grand, childlike,
all-credent appreciation, which distinguishes the earlier and Scriptural
literatures. Abraham fills up all the space between earth and heaven.
Later, we arrive at limitations and secondary laws; we heap these up
till the primal fact is obscured, is hidden by them. Then ensues an
impression of man's littleness, emptiness, insignificance, utter,
mechanical limitation. Then sharp-eyed gentlemen discover that man has a
trick of dressing up his littleness in large terms,--liberty, intuition,
inspiration, immortality,--and that he only is a philosopher, who cannot
be deceived by this shallow stratagem. Your "philosopher" sees what men
are made of. Populaces may fancy that man is central in the world, that
he is the all-containing vessel of its uses: but your philosopher,
admirable gentleman, sees through all that; he is superior to any such
vulgar partiality for that particular species of insect to which he
happens to belong. "A fly thinks himself the greatest of created
beings," says philosopher; "man flatters himself in the same way; but I,
I am not merely man, I am philosopher, and know better."

The early seers and poets had not attained to this sublime
superciliousness of self-contempt; for this, of course, is a fruit t