ily, who looks on enjoyment of
life as the highest good, and though at times he has glimpses and vague
feelings of the ideal life and expresses them in his poems, yet he has
never comprehended it, much less lived it. I, on the contrary, am
essentially an enthusiast, that is, so inspired by the ideal as to be
ready to offer myself up to it, and even prompted to let myself be
absorbed by it. But, as a fact, I have caught at the enjoyments of life,
and found pleasure in them; hence the fierce struggle that goes on in me
between my clear reason, which approves the enjoyments of life, and
rejects the devotion of self-sacrifice as a folly, and my enthusiasm,
which is always rising up and laying violent hands on me, and trying to
drag me down again to her ancient solitary realm. Up, I ought perhaps to
say, for it is still a grave question whether the enthusiast who gives
up his life for the idea does not in a single moment live more and feel
more than Herr von Goethe in his sixth-and-seventieth year of egotistic
tranquillity." Heine was not a typical Hebrew, and hence the struggle of
which he speaks; but his words express what we want to have expressed.
The true Hellene lives for the sake of life, and for whatsoever things
are lovely and charming. The true Hebrew lives for the sake of his idea,
and for whatsoever things are of spiritual power.

The consequence is that, while the imagination, the rapture, and the
pathos of the Hebrew rose to heights and descended to depths utterly
beyond the consciousness of the ordinary Hellene, the Hellenes, on the
contrary, attained to a justness of intellectual and artistic perception
which formed no part of the ordinary Hebrew culture. The general manner
of all the Hebrew prophets, of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, or Joel, is
the same--the manner of the fiercest afflatus, of entire abandonment,
finding expression in phrases of magnificent solemnity and in imagery
of the profoundest awesomeness. This manner the Greeks never show. Not
even AEschylus, the most Hebraic of Hellenes, has any passages in which
he loses control of his artistic sense. Neither he nor any other Hellene
sees ecstatic visions or dreams ecstatic dreams. There is no place in
the Greek comprehension for that state of mind which can beget visions
like these: "And I looked, and behold! A whirlwind came out of the
north, a gray cloud and a fire enfolding itself, and a brightness was
about it, and out of the midst thereof as the