ll to live upon himself, even in
outward form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the world.
The beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty; the statues of
the gods had the least traces of sex. Here there is a moral
sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature,
yet with a divine beauty and significance of its own.

Over and over again the world has been surprised by the heroism, the
insight, the passion, of this clear crystal nature. Poetry and
poetical history have dreamed of a crisis, where it must needs be that
some human victim be sent down into the grave. These are they whom in
its profound emotion humanity might choose to send. "What," says
Carlyle, of Charlotte Corday, "What if she had emerged from her
secluded stillness, suddenly like a star; cruel-lovely, with
half-angelic, half-daemonic splendour; to gleam for a moment, and in a
moment be extinguished; to be held in memory, so bright complete was
she, through long centuries!"

Often the presence of this nature is felt like a sweet aroma in early
manhood. Afterwards, as the adulterated atmosphere of the world
assimilates [254] us to itself, the savour of it faints away. Perhaps
there are flushes of it in all of us; recurring moments of it in every
period of life. Certainly this is so with every man of genius. It is
a thread of pure white light that one might disentwine from the
tumultuary richness of Goethe's nature. It is a natural prophecy of
what the next generation will appear, renerved, modified by the ideas
of this. There is a violence, an impossibility about men who have
ideas, which makes one suspect that they could never be the type of any
widespread life. Society could not be conformed to their image but by
an unlovely straining from its true order. Well, in this nature the
idea appears softened, harmonised as by distance, with an engaging
naturalness, without the noise of axe or hammer.

People have often tried to find a type of life that might serve as a
basement type. The philosopher, the saint, the artist, neither of them
can be this type; the order of nature itself makes them exceptional.
It cannot be the pedant, or the conservative, or anything rash and
irreverent. Also the type must be one discontented with society as it
is. The nature here indicated alone is worthy to be this type. A
majority of such would be the regeneration of the world.

July, 1864.

NOTES

250. +Transliteration