his whole career; he took every
creature and thing from God's hand with reverent expectation, and never
rested till he had opened to some intent of the Maker therein. Things,
therefore, in his view are no longer empty and hollow like old cast-off
shoes, but pieces of sublime design. A beetle is sustained by earth,
air, fire, and water, needs the sun and the sea, winter and summer,
earth's orbit and parallax, needs whatever has been made, to set him on
his legs. He carries the world in little, and is a creeping black body
of the best.

Much more man is microcosmic and macrocosmic. Natural and supernatural
meet concealedly in the out-world, but openly in him, and his early
desires grow into a future surpassing all desire. The poet sees his
destiny in our wishes,--sees right and wrong, kindness and greediness,
deepening into incalculable grandeurs of heaven and hell. He sees the
man never yet arrived, but now arriving, to inhabit each breast. "Far
off his coming" shines. We have many little gleams of generosity; we
have conviction, and can strike for the right. Nature is a fixed
quantity, a solid; but life is reinforced by life. Truth begets truth,
love kindles love, every end is a new beginning.

Therefore the perception of genius is prophetic,--an anticipation of
manhood for this boy, who is the King's son, child of Eternity, and only
changeling of Time. Wherever any magnanimity is revealed, I lay claim to
it. The courage of heroes, the purity of angels, the generosity of God,
is no more than I need. Only show virtue unmixed at the heart of this
system, and you open my destiny in that. If there be but the least spark
of pure benignity, it is a fire will spread through all and fill the
breast; for Good makes good, and what it is I must become. Man is heir
not to any possession or commodity, though it were a homestead in all
heavens, but to the moral power which we ache to exercise. To-day I am a
poor starveling of Nature, sucking many a dry straw, but so sure as God
I shall stream like the sun. The meanest creature is a promise of such
power, for in each is some radiation as well as suction. Man grows,
indeed, faster than he can be filled, and so is forever empty; but if
power is never a _plenum_, it is never drawn dry, and at least the
mantling foam of it fills the cup. Our expectation is that bead on the
draught of being, and boils over the brim.

Imagination is the spiritual sight, working upward from the fact,
down