mes, "not
in entire forgetfulness." The fact, that Arion preferred jumping
overboard to being converted into a heave-offering, is typical of the
self-extinguishment and natural dissolution of the true soul, born into
a humanity which is not its counterpart, which cannot answer to it.
Those providential dolphins are a grateful posterity, which preserve
not only the Poet's treasures, but his memory. The conflict among the
sailors, too, has a deep meaning, hidden also in that old, wonderful
myth of the Kilkenny cats.

But an allegory has many sides, like a genuine symphony. Each reader
will interpret all of them best from his own point of view. Should
Henry himself turn out to be Arion, the feat would only be one of
inverted transmigration, and not more extraordinary than the regular
method.

II.

An opportunity is taken to introduce some further remarks of the author
concerning History. They are found among a multitude of fragments,
arranged under the three heads of Philosophical, Critical, and Moral;
an amorphous heap of sayings, generally of great beauty and power. The
present have little connexion with the text, but will be their own
excuse. The total of his remarks will be seen to hint at a theory of
History, with which most school-histories and respectable annals are in
no wise infected.

'Luck or fate is talent for history. The sense for apprehending
occurrences is the prophetic, and luck the divining instinct. (Hence
the ancients justly considered a man's luck one of his talents.) We
take delight in divination. Romance has arisen from the want of
history.

'History creates itself. It first arises through the connexion of the
past with the future. Men treat their recollections much too negligently.

'The historian organizes the historical Essence. The data of history
are the mass, to which the historian gives form, while giving
animation. Consequently history always presupposes the principles of
animation and organization; and where they are not antecedent there can
be no genuine historical _chef d'[oe]uvre_, but only here and there the
traces of an accidental animation, where a capricious genius has ruled.

'The demand, to consider this present world the best, is exactly
analogous to that which would consider my own wedded wife the best and
only woman, and life to be entirely for her and in her. Many similar
demands and pretensions are there, which he who dutifully ackn