us, be he
king or peasant. He that merely shammed and grimaced with it, however
much, and with whatever noise and trumpet-blowing, he may have cooked
and eaten in this world, cannot long have any. Some men do COOK
enormously (let us call it COOKING, what a man does in obedience to
his HUNGER merely, to his desires and passions merely),--roasting
whole continents and populations, in the flames of war or other
discord;--witness the Napoleon above spoken of. For the appetite of man
in that respect is unlimited; in truth, infinite; and the smallest of
us could eat the entire Solar System, had we the chance given, and then
cry, like Alexander of Macedon, because we had no more Solar Systems to
cook and eat. It is not the extent of the man's cookery that can much
attach me to him; but only the man himself, and what of strength he had
to wrestle with the mud-elements, and what of victory he got for his own
benefit and mine.

4. ENCOURAGEMENTS, DISCOURAGEMENTS.

French Revolution having spent itself, or sunk in France and elsewhere
to what we see, a certain curiosity reawakens as to what of great
or manful we can discover on the other side of that still troubled
atmosphere of the Present and immediate Past. Curiosity quickened, or
which should be quickened, by the great and all-absorbing question, How
is that same exploded Past ever to settle down again? Not lost forever,
it would appear: the New Era has not annihilated the old eras: New Era
could by no means manage that;--never meant that, had it known its own
mind (which it did not): its meaning was and is, to get its own well out
of them; to readapt, in a purified shape, the old eras, and appropriate
whatever was true and NOT combustible in them: that was the poor New
Era's meaning, in the frightful explosion it made of itself and its
possessions, to begin with!

And the question of questions now is: What part of that exploded Past,
the ruins and dust of which still darken all the air, will continually
gravitate back to us; be reshaped, transformed, readapted, that so, in
new figures, under new conditions, it may enrich and nourish us again?
What part of it, not being incombustible, has actually gone to flame and
gas in the huge world-conflagration, and is now GASEOUS, mounting aloft;
and will know no beneficence of gravitation, but mount, and roam
upon the waste winds forever,--Nature so ordering it, in spite of any
industry of Art? This is the universal question o