Pantheistic revery of the kind I have been describing leads inevitably to a special type of symbolism. The Rousseauist reads into nature unutterable love. He sees shining through its finite forms the light of the infinite. The Germans especially set out to express symbolically the relationship between the love and infinitude that they saw in nature and the kindred elements in themselves. Any one who has attempted to thread his way through the German theories of the symbol will feel that he has, like Wordsworth’s shepherd, “been in the heart of many thousand mists.” But in view of the importance of the subject it is necessary to venture for a moment into this metaphysical murk. Schelling’s “Nature Philosophy” is perhaps the most ambitious of all the German attempts to run together symbolically the human spirit and phenomenal nature. “What we call nature,” says Schelling, “is a poem that lies hidden in a secret wondrous writing”; if the riddle could be revealed we should recognize in nature “the Odyssey of the Spirit.” “There looks out through sensuous objects as through a half-transparent mist the world of phantasy for which we long.” “All things are only a garment of the world of spirit.” “To be romantic,” says Uhland, “is to have an inkling of the infinite in appearances.” “Beauty,” says Schelling in similar vein, “is a finite rendering of the infinite.” Now the infinite and the finite can only be thus brought together through the medium of the symbol. Therefore, as A. W. Schlegel says, “beauty is a symbolical representation of the infinite. All poetry is an everlasting symbolizing.”