It would be easy to multiply illustrations of this simple but important truth. All vigorous minds, I think, love books and persons that are mentally enfranchising and onward-looking, that seem to overthrow the high board fences of conventional thought and show a distance with purple hills; while it would be possible to mention powerful minds that have quickly lost influence by giving too much the impression of finality, as if they thought their system was the last. They only build another board fence a little beyond the old one. Perhaps the most admirable and original thing about Emerson is the invincible openness and renewal that seem to be in him, and some of us find his best expression in that address on the “Method of Nature” in which, even more than elsewhere, he makes us feel that what is achieved is ever transitory, and that there is everything to expect from the future. In like manner, to take perhaps the most remarkable example of all, the early Christians found in their belief organized hope, in contrast to the organized _ennui_ of the Roman system of thought, and this, it would seem, must have been its most direct and potent appeal to most minds.[88] It is also because of this ideal and imaginative character in personal ascendency that mystery enters so largely into it. Our allegiance is accompanied by a mental enlargement and renewal through generative suggestions; we are passing from the familiar to the strange, are being drawn we know not whither by forces never before experienced; the very essence of the matter is novelty, insecurity, and that excitement in the presence of dim possibilities that constitutes mystery. It has often been remarked that to one in love the beloved person appears as a mystery, enveloped, as it were, in a sort of purple cloud. This is doubtless because the lover is undergoing strange alteration in his own mind; fresh vague passions are rising into consciousness out of the dark storehouse of hereditary instinct; he is cast loose from his old anchorage and does not know whither he is driven. The consequent feeling of a power and a strangeness upon him he associates, of course, with the person—commonplace enough, perhaps, to others—who is the symbol and occasion of the experience. Goethe seems to mean something of this sort when he uses the expression _das ewig Weibliche_ to suggest the general mystery and allurement of new life.