The consequence is, as it seems to me, very plain. Poets, living in fifth, or fiftieth floors, may make poems, but not marriages; neither may they keep, nor establish, houses. Canaries' breeding cages have to be more roomy than their singing cages. If this be so, then, what does the author's pen do? Like a child's, it traces in ink the characters which nature has faintly marked in the reader with pencil. The author's strings only vibrate in unison with the reader's octaves, fifths, fourths, and thirds--not with his seconds or sevenths. Unsympathetic readers do not become sympathetic ones; it is only the cognate, or congruent, sort which rise to the author's level or pass beyond it. And with this stands or falls my fourth postulate. The iron shoe of Pegasus is the armature of the magnet of truth, increasing its power of attraction; yet we are hungry birds, and fly at the poet's grapes as though they were real ones, thinking the _boy_ a painted one, when we really ought to be frightened at _him_. The transition from this to the fifth postulate is a self-evident matter. Man has such a high opinion of everything in the shape of antiquity, that he prolongs it, and keeps it alive, and lives according to it, though it be but the cover and the mask of the very poison which will destroy itself. There are two proofs of this proposition which I leave aside, of set purpose; the first is, Religion, which is all gnawed to worm dust; the second, Freedom, which is quite as much crumbled to powder as the other. In my capacity of a member of the Lutheran Church, I merely glance at the subject of relics (in support of the proposition)--relics, in the case of which, as Vasquez the Jesuit informs us, if they chance to be entirely eaten up of worms, we must continue to worship what remains--that is to say, the worms which have eaten them. Wherefore, meddle not with that nest of worms, the time in which thou livest, or it will eat thee up; a million of worms are quite equal to one dragon.