tain these characteristics. A person of childlike
genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of
the Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. In
reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains
and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the
eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had it seems the
same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart
precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between Greek
and English, between Classic and Romantic schools, seems superficial and
pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,--when a truth
that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel
that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the
same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees
of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry,
and the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite
parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the
world he has the same key. When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps
of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer
of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of
tradition and the caricature of institutions.

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us
new facts in nature. I see that men of God have from time to time walked
among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the
commonest hearer. Hence evidently the tripod, the priest, the priestess
inspired by the divine afflatus.

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him to
history, or reconcile him with themselves. As they come to revere their
intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains every
fact, every word.

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu, of
Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any
antiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs.

I have seen the first monks and anchorets, without crossing seas or
centuries. More than once some individual has appeared to me with
such negligence of labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty
beneficiary begging in the name of God, as made good to the nineteenth
century Simeon the Stylit