“Faith in the _hereafter_ is as necessary for the intellectual as the moral character, and to the man of letters as well as to the Christian, the present forms but the slightest portion of his existence.”—_Southey._ Goethe did not think so. “Genutzt dem Augenblick,” “_Use_ the present,” was _his_ favourite maxim; and always this notion of sacrificing or slighting the present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to be the most important part of our existence, as it is the only part of it over which we have power. It is in the present only that we absolve the past and lay the foundation for the future. [Illustration] 114. “Je allseitigen, je individueller,” is a beautiful significant phrase, quite untranslateable, used, I think, by Rahel (Madame Varnhagen). It means that the more the mind can multiply on every side its capacities of thinking and feeling, the more individual, the more original, that mind becomes. [Illustration] 115. “I wonder,” said C., “that facts should be called _stubborn_ things.” I wonder, too, seeing you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue or misrepresent a fact into twenty different forms. “Il n’y a rien qui s’arrange aussi facilement que les faits,”—Nothing so _tractable_ as facts,—said Benjamin Constant. True; so long as facts are only material,—or as one should say, mere matter of fact,—you can modify them to a purpose, turn them upside down and inside out; but once vivify a fact with a feeling, and it stands up before us a living and a very stubborn thing. [Illustration] 116. Every human being is born to influence some other human being; or many, or all human beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the sympathies, rather than of the intellect. It was said, and very beautifully said, that “one man’s wit becomes all men’s wisdom.” Even more true is it that one man’s virtue becomes a standard which raises our anticipation of possible goodness in all men. 117. It is curious that the memory, most retentive of images, should yet be much more retentive of feelings than of facts: for instance, we remember with such intense vividness a period of suffering, that it seems even to renew itself through the medium of thought; yet, at the same time, we perhaps find difficulty in recalling, with any distinctness, the causes of that pain. [Illustration] 118. “Truth has never manifested itself to me in such a broad stream of light as seems to be poured upon some minds. Truth has appeared to my mental eye, like a vivid, yet small and trembling star in a storm, now appearing for a moment with a beauty that enraptured, now lost in such clouds, as, had I less faith, might make me suspect that the previous clear sight had been a delusion.”—_Blanco White._