at I make them." "The sun is thy
plaything," my soul says to me, "O, mighty Child, the stars thy
companions. Stand up! Come out in the day! laugh the great winds to thy
side. The sea, if thou wilt have it so, is thy frog-pond and thou shalt
play with the lightnings in thy breast."

"Aye, aye," I cry, "I know it! The youth of the world seizes my whole
being. I hurrah like a child through all knowledge. I have taken all
heaven for my nursery. The world is my rocking-horse. Things are not
only for things, and my body in the end for things, but now I _live_, I
_live_, and things are for me!" "Aye, aye, and they shall be to thee,"
said my soul, "what thou biddest them."

And now I go forth quietly. "Do you not see, O mountains, that you must
reckon with me? I am the younger brother of the stars. I have faced
nations in my heart. Great bullying, hulking, half-dead centuries I have
faced. I have made them speak to me, and have dared against them. If
there is history, I also am history. If there are facts, I also am a
fact. If there are laws, it is one of the laws that I am one of the
laws."

All knowledge, I have said in my heart, instead of being a kind of vast
overseer-and-slave system for a man to lock himself up in, and throw
away his key in, becomes free, fluent, daring, and glorious the moment
it is conceived through persons and for persons and with persons.
Knowledge is not knowledge until it is conceived in relation to persons;
that is, in relation to all the facts. Persons are facts also and on the
whole the main facts, the facts which for seventy years, at least, or
until the planet is too cooled off, all other facts are for. The world
belongs to persons, is related to persons, and all the knowledge
thereof, and by heaven, and by my soul's delight, all the persons the
knowledge is related to shall belong to me, and the knowledge that is
related to them shall belong to me, the whole human round of it. The
spirit and rhythm and song of their knowledge, the thing in it that is
real to them, that sings out their lives to them, shall sing to me.

Book IV

What to Do Next

"I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations,
Crying, 'Leap from your seats and contend for your lives!'"

I

See Next Chapter

It is good to rise early in the morning, when the world is still
respectable and nobody has used it yet, and sit and look at it, try to
realise it. One sees things very differently. It is a kind of