Psalms!
Literature, like the old Prayer-Collections of the first centuries,
were it 'well selected from and burnt,' contains precious things. For
Literature, with all its printing-presses, puffing-engines and
shoreless deafening triviality, _is_ yet 'the Thought of Thinking
Souls.' A sacred 'religion,' if you like the name, does live in the
heart of that strange froth-ocean, not wholly froth, which we call
Literature; and will more and more disclose itself therefrom;--not now
as scorching Fire: the red smoky scorching Fire has purified itself
into white sunny Light. Is not Light grander than Fire? It is the same
element in a state of purity.

My ingenuous readers, we will march out of this Third Book with a
rhythmic word of Goethe's on our lips; a word which perhaps has
already sung itself, in dark hours and in bright, through many a
heart. To me, finding it devout yet wholly credible and veritable,
full of piety yet free of cant; to me, joyfully finding much in it,
and joyfully missing so much in it, this little snatch of music, by
the greatest German Man, sounds like a stanza in the grand _Road-Song_
and _Marching-Song_ of our great Teutonic Kindred, wending, wending,
valiant and victorious, through the undiscovered Deeps of Time! He
calls it _Mason-Lodge_,--not Psalm or Hymn:

The Mason's ways are
A type of Existence,
And his persistence
Is as the days are
Of men in this world.

The Future hides in it
Gladness and sorrow;
We press still thorow,
Nought that abides in it
Daunting us,--onward.

And solemn before us,
Veiled, the dark Portal,
Goal of all mortal:--
Stars silent rest o'er us,
Graves under us silent!

While earnest thou gazest,
Comes boding of terror,
Comes phantasm and error,
Perplexes the bravest
With doubt and misgiving.

But heard are the Voices,--
Heard are the Sages,
The Worlds and the Ages:
"Choose well, your choice is
Brief and yet endless:

Here eyes do regard you,
In Eternity's stillness;
Here is all fulness,
Ye brave, to reward you;
Work, and despair not."

BOOK IV.

HOROSCOPE.

CHAPTER I.

ARISTOCRACIES.

To predict the Future, to manage the Present, would not be so
impossible, had not the Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled;
effaced, and what is worse, defaced! The Past cannot be seen; the
Past, looked at through the medium of '