ing, commanding enigma to
following ages. They do but repeat the promise and obscurity of Nature,
for she herself has the same largeness, is such another _raptus_,
proceeding to no end, but to a circle or complexity of ends. Men are
again and again divided over the images of Paul, of Plato, of Dante,
unable to escape from their authority, more unable to give them final
interpretation. They leave Nature, to puzzle over the inexhaustible
book. What does it mean? What does it not mean? The poet will never wait
till he can demonstrate and explain. He must hasten to convey a blessing
greater than explanation, to publish, if it were only by broken hints,
by signs and dumb pointing, his sense of a presence not to be
comprehended or named.

For, if the seer is sustained, he is also commanded by what he sees.
Genius is not religious, but religion, an opening to the conscience of
the universe no less than to the joy. From this original the moral,
intellectual, and aesthetic sense will each derive a conscience, and rule
with equal sovereignty the man. Through an ant or an angel the first
influx of reality is entertained in an attitude of worship, and the
poet, in his vision, cries with Virgil to Dante:--

"Down, down, bend low
Thy knees! behold God's angel! fold thy hands!
Henceforward shalt thou see true ministers!"

Revelation is not more a new light than a new heart and will; revelation
to me is the conquest and renewal of me. What is lovely will not be
encountered without love, the Creator holds the key to the creature,
Order and Right may freely enter to be man. He who can open any object
to its source is touched therein by the finger of God, and insight is
inevitable consecration. Give the coward a suspicion of our human
destiny, and he is no longer coward; he would gladly be cut in pieces
and burned in any flame to shed abroad that light. Life has such an
irresistible tendency to extend, that it makes of the man a mere
vehicle, takes him for hands and feet, wheels and wings: he is glad only
when the truth runs and prevails. Enthusiasm, devotion, earnestness are
names for this possession of the deep thinker by his thought. He lives
in that, and has in it his prosperity, no longer in the flesh. The
inspired man becomes great by absorption in a great design; he is
preoccupied, and trifles, for which other men are bought and sold, shine
before him as beads of glass with which savages are wheedled. We drop
our playthin