ng 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 persistance
Is as the days are
Of men in this world.

The Future hides in it
Good hap 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 stilness;
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 'Philosophical History'
in these times, cannot even be _not_ seen: it is misseen;
affirmed to have existed,--and to have been a godless
Impossibility. Your Norman Conquerors, true royal souls, crowned
kings as such, were vulturous irrational tyrants: your Becket
was a noisy egoist and hypocrite; getting his brains spilt on
the floor of Canterbury Cathedral, to secure the main chance,--
somewhat uncertain how! "Enthusiasm," and even "honest
Enthusiasm,"--yes, of course:

'The Dog, to gain his private ends,
_Went_ mad, and bit the Man!'--

For in truth, the eye sees in all things 'what it brought with it
the means of seeing.' A godless century, looking back on
centuries that were godly, produces portraitures more miraculous
than any other.