For whether considered as poet or naturalist, he is our finest example of the reverent faith in nature and tenderness of treatment that becomes her student and devotees. And hence the rich spoils and prime suggestions with which he charms and rewards in his books. Wooed in this spirit, nature vouchsafed him the privilege of reading her secrets. An eye-witness of the facts, he had the magic pen to portray them as they rose midway between matter and mind, there caught them lovingly and held them forth in intertwisted myths and gay marriages to the sense and sentiment of his reader. Writing faithfully to the form of things, he yet had a finer moral than these could deliver; the vein of quiet mysticism in which he delighted, giving a graceful charm to the writing. How finely his senses symbolized his thought, and his eye how Olympian! What subtle perception of the contraries in character! He has treated the strife of the Worst for the Best, the problem of evil, more cunningly than any; than Moses; than the author of Job of Uz; than Milton, the Puritan, fitted as he was alike by birth and culture to deal with this world fable,--his faith in nature being so entire, his rare gifts at instant command for rendering perfect copies of what he saw, and loved to represent in its truthfulness to sense and soul alike. A seer of Spirit, the draughtsman of guile; to him sat the demons gladly, and he sketched their likenesses,--portraits of the dualities he knew so well; the same with which most are too familiar; the drama of the temptation being coeval with man, the catastrophe thus far repeated disastrously, the striving of the Many against the One, the world-spirit bribing the will, proffering the present delights for the future pains. Ah! could he but have found himself in the One, whom, with such surpassing skill he individualized, but failed to impersonate. His aloofness from life, his residence in the Many, his inability to identify himself with the whole of things,--this duplicity of genius denied him free admittance to unity. Cunning he was, not wise in the simplicity of wisdom. As the Fates conceived, so they slew him, yet by subtleties so siren, as to persuade him of an immortality not theirs to bestow. All he was, his Faust celebrates--admitted to heaven, as Goethe to glory, without the fee that opens honestly its gates. Oh, artist of beauty! Couldst thou but have been equal to portray the Spirit of spirits as cunningly as of Matter! But it was the temper of that age of transition, and thou wast its priest and poet.