Straightway, a forgetting wind
Stole over the celestial kind,
And their lips the secret kept, -
If in ashes the fire-seed slept.

But now and then, truth-speaking things
Shamed the angels' veiling wings;
And, shrilling from the solar course,
Or from fruit of chemic force,
Procession of a soul in matter,
Or the speeding change of water,
Or out of the good of evil born,
Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn,
And a blush tinged the upper sky,

And the gods shook, they knew not why."

Another most remarkable poetic statement of the law of return, which Emerson saw to be the foundation of the universe, is the oracle prefixed to the essay on "Spiritual Laws":

"The living Heaven thy prayers respect,
House at once and architect,

Quarrying man's rejected hours,
Builds therewith eternal towers;
Sole and self-commanded works,
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays,

And, by the famous might that lurks

In reaction and recoil,

Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil;

Forging, through swart arms of Offence,
The silver seat of Innocence."

The universe is here spoken of as the living Heaven, which contains and upholds, and at the same time is active builder or architect; using the hours that man has not moulded by his feeble will,

it erects eternal towers. It is sole and self-commanded, not co-ordinate with any one, but supreme. It does not fear overthrow of its divine good through the evil works of wicked men who have not learned to will the good for its own sake. By the famous might of this law of return, the deepest of Heaven's laws, flame will freeze and ice will boil; evil will bless, by curing the perverse will through the pain of its recoil. Through the dark ministration of offending deeds the silver seat of Innocence will be forged. The universe is so made that as a whole it always brings out good from evil, and "better thence again." The individual is prevented from subsisting contentedly in evil through the ministration of pain. "He makes the wrath of man to praise Him."

XV.

EMERSON'S RELATION TO GOETHE
AND CARLYLE.

BY WILLIAM T. HARRIS.

IN our study of the great man and his environment we must consider, before all, his contemporaries. By common consent Emerson is joined with Carlyle as co-author of the stream of influence which has acted so powerfully on the thinking and literary expression of the nineteenth century.

Other sources of the same stream of influence are Coleridge and Wordsworth. The latter, -Wordsworth, indeed, stands for the great English poet of the century with a large and increasing number of highly cultured people. We have already, in discussing the relation of Emerson to Nature, spoken of the characteristics of poetry. Poetry performs the office of imposing a spiritual view of some sort upon the world as it exists for us. The poet passes it through his mind, and forthwith his version of nature, of men and things, is accepted by his readers and becomes their view of the world. There goes with poetry music of rhythm and rhyme; but that is less essential than the trope and personification by which the

THE

poet makes over the things of the world into means of spiritual expression. They were prose facts, mere opaque things; now they become transparent, and a sort of spiritual light shines through them. They express facts of human experience, — facts that were unutterable before. The deep spiritual truths which could not be communicated nor even conceived clearly, now by the poet's aid become expressible in trope and metaphor and through the personification of natural things. The invisible is now visible.

This function of poetry in revealing spiritual experience and the structure of our moral and intellectual selves by metaphor and personification goes on from age to age. There are poets of various degrees of universality. Homer's revelation underlies all our literature, all the literature of European civilization. He taught man to recognize in nature the presence of human spirit. Every object is an expression of some spiritual being: the fountains, groves, mountains, streams, clouds, winds, waves, plants, animals, -all express in their motions, sounds, appearances, some passion, some desire or meaning of invisible conscious beings. Nurtured in this view of the world, it is not strange that the European man has learned to know himself in the course of three thousand years by seeing his reflection in an ideal world created for him by the Muse.

In the line of Homer have followed other poets, great and small. The great poets since Homer have taken new themes, new experiences of the inner

world of man, and found their expression in terms of correspondence with external nature. Dante has revealed thus the inner world of Christianity. Shakspeare has made visible the genesis of human institutions from the individual man; he has shown man as a social animal creating the social forms and evolving social unities, the colossal institutions in which he lives. We may study the individual, and see how these greater selves come to manifest themselves in his thinking and feeling. Each individual shows fragments of his larger self; he indicates his place in some institution which supplements his deficiencies. If Shakspeare is the revealer of the essential character of human institutions, teaching us in what sense they are the substance of individual men, Goethe is the revealer of a new phase of human experience, of still deeper and subtler spiritual laws. Goethe shows the individual not so much the source, as the result, of institutions. All returns to the individual. The institution which man generates and places over himself as a supreme self to nurture and preserve him, educates him; all that he gives to it returns to him. By sufficient intelligence he shall be able to turn all manner of fortune into blessing. The attitude of the individual towards the world is therefore all-important. The Christian religion had taught from the beginning the gerin of this doctrine. It is the attitude of the soul towards the world that determines its state of weal or woe. The soul, in the Inferno of Dante, seeks directly the