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and intellect, when he too-and yet Pascal, if any surely conversant with the raptures of devoted fai looked up and said Le silence éternel de ces es 'infinis m'effraie'. The book whence I quote these has in truth been beyond most a spiritual influence men beyond most Pascal's Thoughts' justify Mi description the precious life-blood of a master-spirit 'balmed and treasured up to a life beyond life'. D therefore was my awakening conviction of the w mystery, nourished even by the general studies just h at, strengthened by pages in which the conflict of fait of perplexity is clothed in language of immortal eloqu When I first read the Chaque chose est ici vraie en p fausse en partie . . . Tous leurs principes sont vrais 'pyrrhoniens, des stoïques, des athées: Mais leurs co 'sions sont fausses, parce que les principes opposés 'vrais aussi',-the famous profession of belief in the p tual flux of human nature;-or that short sentence, si and deep as childhood, Les raisons qui étant vues de 'semblent borner notre vue, quand on y est arrivé 'bornent plus: on commence à voir au delà',-I ca express without words apparently overstrained the of moral catastrophe, almost physical in its far-exten intensity, with which such confessions from such a thi affected me. 'C'est une chose horrible, de sentir éco 'tout ce qu'on possède'. Pascal appeared to stamp the irresistible might of genius and proclaim as it wer the housetops, a thousand feelings dormant hitherto diffident within the heart's secret chambers. A Chris a mathematician, a man of the world,-if in last result gifted spirit could say only, he saw trop pour nie 'trop peu pour s'assurer', had I any right to disappo

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ment or to alarm should I rediscover at the goal that ignorance I had once too proudly believed left for ever as I started on the pursuit of knowledge? C'est une ignorance 'savante qui se connaît': but was this, indeed, the 'be all ' and end all', the final word of Wisdom?

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XXV Two of our own writers, fundamentally contrasted in the results and in the form of their teaching, combined next to confirm these convictions. One, a seer if not a poet, armed like Thor his hero with crushing power rather to destroy the false shows and hypocrisies of daily life, than to replace them by fresh forms of light and truth: one of the elder Gods with large bold utterance: a Titan dethroned, half blind to the glow and beauty in the eyes of Hyperion, groaning over the lost early world, mistaking often retrospect for prophecy, his own restrictedness in practical action for national impotence, conscious beyond most of the strength and health and nobleness of former ages, yet eager to recognize what is excellent and harmonious in the present, rugged yet tender-hearted, genuine Man in this age the most lofty-minded and impetuous of Truth's unsuccessful suitors. . . . Who has succeeded? Not the other, although his also was a truly inspired soul, a spirit so aethereally winged, that one would have thought the loftiest star of heaven within his visitation, yet moved by sympathy more than common for man, frequent in ministrations to the poor and suffering, loving his fellow-creatures with womanly tenderness, but, like Dante, uniting that love to scorn of wickedness, hatred of tyranny, and sorrow almost beyond even his command of words over the world's 'wrong'-adding 'the tears of the defenceless' to 'the ( anger of the just'. He, to sum up in a word, (and that his own), if any of the sons of men was himself what he described:

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With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower.

Deep indeed is the thankfulness, devout the rever due from those, and the young especially, whose hearts like Carlyle and Shelley (to borrow the sublime imager the Hebrew prophet) have touched with coals of fire. it is an equal duty to love and to revere with discrim tion. I shall not repeat the charge, common and exag rated, that Shelley's poetry is deficient in human grasp interest: believing that this criticism arises partly f secret unwillingness to admit the many sad conclusion his thought, partly from a careless confusion of his yoful imperfect works with the later, in part from subtleness and intensity of his genius and the fact (in his own noble phrase), he has not sufficiently 'pered this planetary music for mortal ears'. But it is possible not to feel with pain the crude violent precipita for which the courageous sincerity of his theological victions can hardly atone, and that over-estimate of his insight into metaphysical and moral truth which Shelley to deface so many splendid stanzas by the in fusion of a Platonism falsely so esteemed. At the c however in my own life, of which I am speaking with egotism, inexcusable without the strong sense that wh felt was a most frequent (and hence representative) strug common-place to a degree which divests it almost of

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sonality-the poet's fluctuating scepticism hardly touched my own religious convictions. These, considered as transcendental faith, appeared to lie within a sphere beyond or beside the perplexities of life and speculation; and years passed before full perception of their interdependence. Nor, on the other hand, however anxious for entire adherence to so powerful a thinker, could I give assent to many, perhaps to what may be justly reckoned the cardinal points of Carlyle's teaching. Of the secret sophistry in his 'doc'trine of sorrow and renunciation',- the simple untruth of his announcement that for suffering and enduring there is no remedy but striving and doing'; that 'manhood 'begins only when we have reconciled ourselves to necessity, ' and thus in reality triumphed over it'; lastly, of the superficial tirade against happiness, the supposed discovery that, by substitution of the syllables blessedness', a glimpse of light, an 'everlasting yea', dawns upon the soul,—I shall in a more appropriate place attempt some criticism. Such thoughts were far then from a reader to whom the lifelong love of Désirée here, and the hope of her love hereafter, composed the better part of all that by human ingenuity, could be conceived as blessedness. But even then, Want of Belief, the prophet's reiterated complaint, I could not conscientiously hold the sin of these ages: I wondered at the weight, 'heavy as frost', of men's customary faith; far more at what they believed, than at what they doubted. True guidance in return for loving 'obedience, properly, if he knew it, the prime want of man', the eloquent sentence which sums up this chapter of Carlyle's philosophy, when interpreted by his own Hero Worship', appears a pitiful and one-sided cry, an idolization of simple success, of that kingdom of force which may in truth be flattered safely, as, in Pascal's phrase, 'it is never sub

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verted.' Interpreted indeed by that most forcible commentators, the recent course of event and opin Europe, I would not hesitate to term these words the of a philosophical slave crying for a phantom Utopi expression of a Dulolatry which has done service to and would almost satisfy Vienna.

XXVI Were this a criticism, I might dwell on master-works which in several ways, but all tending result, left another reader than had opened them. less Youth wanders into a magic circle unawares, 1 with friends, takes his pleasure in racing-boats or country, attends hall and chapel, and meanwhile th grows dark at mid-day, and stars come out and dance him, and spirits gather round, and the Magician is b as he turns:-and as we read of the Adept who returned Agrippa from his incantation within the Coliseum, alth after awhile the vision closes, he sees spectres in con daylight moving over the housetops in the Corso. I attempted to describe the first influences of imagin poetry over youth by a parable borrowed from Simon so we might speak of early study under the figu Eleusinic initiation, perhaps more worthily. We have out from Athens in festival dress on a harvest night Academy is on the left, the torch-bearers escort u safety by the rock where Oedipus sat once, and its m rious inhabitants, Earth and Darkness; the white cl Colonus seems to carry down a glimmer of moonb above the Furies' grove and Dionysos, it may be (for nightingale is silent) shouting to his Nymphs :-'0 'sandalled' Aegaleos now glooms larger on the right, the waves run softly to our feet over the sands of Sciro it has been a delightful expedition :- but the guides onward, the torches sparkle, we are before the shrin

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