elations of divine uses in Nature,--and
see what they will think of your sanity. You may, indeed, if such be
your humor, observe these matters, nay, even write books upon them, and
still escape the lunatic asylum,--_provided_ you do so in the way of
pleasantry. In this case, the gravest _savant_, if he have children, may
condescend to listen, and even to smile. But ask him to attend to this
_in his quality of man of science_, and no less seriously than he would
investigate the history of mud-worms, and you become ridiculous in his
eyes.

Goethe is guiltless of this inversion of interest. Truth of outward
Nature he respects; truth of the soul he reverences. He can really
_imagine_ men,--that is, can so depict them that they shall not be mere
bundles of finite quantities, a yard of this and a pound of that, but so
that the illimitable possibilities and immortal ancestries of man shall
look forth from their eyes, shall show in their features, and give to
them a certain grace of the infinite. The powers which created for the
Greeks their gods are active in him, even in his observation of men; and
this gives him that other eye, without which the effigies of men are
seen, but never man himself. And because he has this divine eye for the
inner reality of personal being, and yet also that eagle eye of his for
conditions and limits,--because he can see man as central in Nature, the
sum of all uses, the vessel of all significance, and yet has no
"carpenter theory" of the universe,--and because he can discern the
substance and the _revealing_ form of man, while yet no satirist sees
more clearly man's accidental and concealing form,--because of this,
history comes in him to new blood, regaining its inspirations without
forfeiture of its experience.

Carlyle has the same eye, but less creative, and tinctured always with
the special humors of his temperament; yet the attitude he can hold
toward a human personality, the spirit in which he can contemplate it,
gives that to his books which will keep them alive, I think, while the
world lasts.

Among the recent writers of prose fiction in England, I know of but one
who, in a degree worth naming in this connection, has regarded and
delineated persons in the large, old, believing way. That one is the
author of "Counterparts." In many respects her book seems to me weak;
its theories are crude, its tone extravagant. But man and woman are
wonderful to her; and when she names them in full v