o exactly knows, is a skeleton at
the feast; that exactness is numbness, and chills every expansive guest.
Dogma is a stoppage quite short of the nearest beginning; the liberal
habit a beginning of all that has no end. Sense is a wall very near the
eye, and when that is penetrated all lies open beyond; we see only
paths, seas, and vistas. Wisdom explores and never concludes. The
explanations of centuries are idle tales: my explanations are not so to
be forestalled. We forget the shallow answers to shallow questions, when
now we have deeper genuine questions to ask. The great are happy babes
of Beauty and Good. Truth returns in a fresh suspicion, and all are
welcome who wear on the brows that soft commingled light and shadow of
an advancing, sweet, inexplicable Fate. Our hope is no house, but a
wing; no roof can be endured but the blue one. What method have we yet
to serve the spontaneous or spiritual being? what culture, art, society,
worship, in which his need and power are so much as recognized? There is
indefinable certainty of Nature beyond Nature, man beyond man. Genius
opens all doors, the earth-doors, the sky-doors,--throws down the
horizon and the heaven, to come into open air. All paths lead out to the
sea, where a day's voyage may teach that the receding circle bounds our
sight alone, and not the deep. We look out not on chaos and darkness,
but on order too large for the brain, and light, for which as owls we
have yet no capacious eye. We leave every perception neglected to wait
on the future; but every future has its future devouring the past. What
is left but bending of the knee and boundless confidence?

* * * * *

MY BROTHER AND I.

From the door where I stand I can see his fair land
Sloping up to a broad sunny height,
The meadows new-shorn, and the green wavy corn,
The buckwheat all blossoming white:
There a gay garden blooms, there are cedars like plumes,
And a rill from the mountain leaps up in a fountain,
And shakes its glad locks in the light.

He dwells in the hall where the long shadows fall
On the checkered and cool esplanade;
I live in a cottage secluded and small,
By a gnarly old apple-tree's shade:
Side by side in the glen, I and my brother Ben,--
Just the river between us, with borders as green as
The banks where in childhood we played.

But now nevermore upon river or shore
He runs or he rows by my side;