akes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never
come real visibility and speech. Thou must descend to the _Mothers_,
to the _Manes_, and Hercules-like long suffer and labour there,
wouldst thou emerge with victory into the sunlight. As in battle and
the shock of war,--for is not this a battle?--thou too shalt fear no
pain or death, shalt love no ease or life; the voice of festive
Lubberlands, the noise of greedy Acheron shall alike lie silent under
thy victorious feet. Thy work, like Dante's, shall 'make thee lean for
many years.' The world and its wages, its criticisms, counsels,
helps, impediments, shall be as a waste ocean-flood; the chaos through
which thou art to swim and sail. Not the waste waves and their weedy
gulf-streams, shalt thou take for guidance: thy star alone,--'_Se tu
segui tua stella!_' Thy star alone, now clear-beaming over Chaos, nay
now by fits gone out, disastrously eclipsed: this only shalt thou
strive to follow. O, it is a business, as I fancy, that of weltering
your way through Chaos and the murk of Hell! Green-eyed dragons
watching you, three-headed Cerberuses,--not without sympathy of
_their_ sort! "_Eccovi l' uom ch' e stato all' Inferno._" For in fine,
as Poet Dryden says, you do walk hand in hand with sheer Madness, all
the way,--who is by no means pleasant company! You look fixedly into
Madness, and _her_ undiscovered, boundless, bottomless Night-empire;
that you may extort new Wisdom out of it, as an Eurydice from
Tartarus. The higher the Wisdom, the closer was its neighbourhood and
kindred with mere Insanity; literally so;--and thou wilt, with a
speechless feeling, observe how highest Wisdom, struggling up into
this world, has oftentimes carried such tinctures and adhesions of
Insanity still cleaving to it hither!

All Works, each in their degree, are a making of Madness sane;--truly
enough a religious operation; which cannot be carried on without
religion. You have not work otherwise; you have eye-service, greedy
grasping of wages, swift and ever swifter manufacture of semblances to
get hold of wages. Instead of better felt-hats to cover your head, you
have bigger lath-and-plaster hats set travelling the streets on
wheels. Instead of heavenly and earthly Guidance for the souls of men,
you have 'Black or White Surplice' Controversies, stuffed
hair-and-leather Popes;--terrestrial _Law-wards_, Lords and
Law-bringers, 'organising Labour' in these years, by passing
Corn-Laws