t a real Elysian
brightness, cries many a timid wayfarer, or the reflex of Pandemonian
lava? Is it of a truth leading us into beatific Asphodel meadows, or
the yellow-burning marl of a Hell-on-Earth?

Our Professor, like other Mystics, whether delirious or inspired,
gives an Editor enough to do. Ever higher and dizzier are the heights
he leads us to; more piercing, all-comprehending, all-confounding are
his views and glances. For example, this of Nature being not an
Aggregate but a Whole:

'Well sang the Hebrew Psalmist: "If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the universe, God is there." Thou
thyself, O cultivated reader, who too probably art no Psalmist, but a
Prosaist, knowing GOD only by tradition, knowest thou any corner of
the world where at least FORCE is not? The drop which thou shakest
from thy wet hand, rests not where it falls, but to-morrow thou
findest it swept away; already on the wings of the Northwind, it is
nearing the Tropic of Cancer. How came it to evaporate, and not lie
motionless? Thinkest thou there is aught motionless; without Force,
and utterly dead?

'As I rode through the Schwarzwald, I said to myself: That little fire
which grows star-like across the dark-growing (_nachtende_) moor,
where the sooty smith bends over his anvil, and thou hopest to replace
thy lost horse-shoe,--is it a detached, separated speck, cut-off from
the whole Universe; or indissolubly joined to the whole? Thou fool,
that smithy-fire was (primarily) kindled at the Sun; is fed by air
that circulates from before Noah's Deluge, from beyond the Dogstar;
therein, with Iron Force, and Coal Force, and the far stranger Force
of Man, are cunning affinities and battles and victories of Force
brought about; it is a little ganglion, or nervous centre, in the
great vital system of Immensity. Call it, if thou wilt, an unconscious
Altar, kindled on the bosom of the All; whose iron sacrifice, whose
iron smoke and influence reach quite through the All; whose dingy
Priest, not by word, yet by brain and sinew, preaches forth the
mystery of Force; nay preaches forth (exoterically enough) one little
textlet from the Gospel of Freedom, the Gospel of Man's Force,
commanding, and one day to be all-commanding.

'Detached, separated! I say there is no such separation: nothing
hitherto was ever stranded, cast aside; but all, were it only a
withered leaf, works together with all; is borne forward on the
bottomle