et,
but in humanity, and through that in the deep. We study Goethe, not any
opinion of Goethe: he represents for us in his measure the nature, need,
and resource of the race, because what he publishes he knows, lives, and
is. We open the mind largely to take the sense of such a gospel: it will
not appear in details of perception. Plato and Goethe see the same sun,
and seem to the vulgar to follow each other; they have more in common
than any man can have in privacy; yet if you enter to the entire habit
of each, you will justify the making of these two. They are like and
unlike, as apples on one and another tree. The great in any time hold in
common the growing truth of their time, and refer to it in intercourse
as understood, an atmosphere which he must breathe who now lives and
thinks; yet no two will be identically related to the same. We are
radiated as spokes from a centre; we enter to it and work for it from
every side.

There is no danger of repetition, if the thought be deep. Superior
insight will always sufficiently astonish, will always be novel in its
place. The more simple the method, the more wonderful every result. Men
are shut, as if by a wall of adamant, from all that is yet beyond their
sympathy. My neighbor is immersed in planting, building, and the new
road. Beside him, companion only in air and sunshine, walks one who has
no ocular adjustment for these atoms; his thought overleaps them in
starting, and is wholly beyond. The end of vision for a practical eye is
beginning of clairvoyance. To the road-maker, man is a maker of roads;
he cracks his nuts and his jokes unconscious, while the ground opens and
the world heaves with revolutions of thought. Ask him in vain what
Webster means by "Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill"; what Channing
sees in the Dignity of Man, or Edwards in the Sweetness of Divine Love;
ask him in vain what is the "Fate" of Aeschylus, the "Compensation" of
Emerson, Carlyle's "Conflux of Eternities," the "Conjunction" of
Swedenborg, the "Newness" of Fox, the "Morning Red" of Behmen, the
"Renunciation" of Goethe, the "Comforter" of Jesus, the "Justification"
of Paul.

For the dull, this mystery of existence is not even a mystery; they are
shut below the firmament of wonder. When the vulgar come with their
definite gain and good, their circle of immediate ends, we feel the
house contract, the sky descend,--we shrivel, our pores close, the skull
hardens on the brain. The positive, wh