peakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul,--ebbing downward into
the forms into whose habits thou hast now for many years slid. As near
and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said
to sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If the man
could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle,
the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endless flight of winged
facts or events? In splendid variety these changes come, all putting
questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior
wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber
them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the men of
sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark
of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man is true to his
better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts, as
one that comes of a higher race; remains fast by the soul and sees the
principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their places; they
know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him.

See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that every word should be a
thing. These figures, he would say, these Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas,
Helen and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific influence on the
mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as real to-day as in the
first Olympiad. Much revolving them he writes out freely his humor, and
gives them body to his own imagination. And although that poem be as
vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more attractive than the
more regular dramatic pieces of the same author, for the reason that it
operates a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of customary
images,--awakens the reader's invention and fancy by the wild freedom of
the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits
on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he seems to vent
a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence
Plato said that "poets utter great and wise things which they do not
themselves understand." All the fictions of the Middle Age explain
themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave
earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve. Magic and all that
is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science. The
shoes o