, and hath
Another to attend him."

The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction which
draws men to science, but the end is lost sight of in attention to the
means. In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence
of Plato, that, "poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history."
Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain
respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences,
which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no
one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends
of study and composition are best answered by announcing
undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through
hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.

I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and
nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have
always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may
be both history and prophecy.

'The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the
element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of
events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of
the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed,
centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one
degradation.

'We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own
and disown our relation to it, by turns. We are, like Nebuchadnezzar,
dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can
set limits to the remedial force of spirit?

'A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer,
and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations
should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and
infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the
arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

'Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved
by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from
him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the
moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized
themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But,
having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no
longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees,
that the st