Travel, with observation of men, and the attempt to work with them, sobers him further. He begins to recognize limits and conditions, and to do so _without_ surrendering his hopes and happy dreams. He perceives, little by little, that there are some men who can give and receive help, and some who can do neither,--some with whom one can nobly coöperate, others whose hands approach his own only to obstruct and entangle. He sees that he himself is limited, and that possibly the world might not fare so much better in his hands than in those of its Maker. It dawns upon him, that, on the whole, he is not here to make worlds, but to work in a limited sphere and for limited results. And yet his hopes and imaginations are not put to shame; for he feels, that, even amid these iron limits of labor and effect, a result of unlimited, _absolute_ worth is also getting wrought. And now, in this harmonizing of heat and cold into one tempered economy, in this recognition of limits and conditions, without surrender of inspiring imagination and hope, he approaches the term of his wandering, and nears home. This consummation is hastened in what may seem a singular way,--by reading Shakspeare. These matchless pictures of real life give him, as life itself had never given, the feeling of _real_. The sentiment of Reality, for the first time, awakens in power. It is much, almost infinitely much, he perceives, to be just this, real. The smallest reality--so with some astonishment he discovers--affords more scope to imagination itself than any conceivable magnificence of make-belief. Real,--rooted in eternal Nature, with a pedigree older than the stars! Is not any pebble, if we consider its advent into existence and its cosmic relations, enough, not only to occupy, but to beggar imagination? Existence,--is not that the one inexhaustible fact? He feels it so, and in that feeling the contending opposites of his being come to sudden reconciliation. Reality,--the hard, cold, critical understanding has done no worse than to insist upon that. But it has insisted upon that after its own cold fashion, as a mere frozen surface, giving no warm and fruitful hospitality to the divine seeds of hope, love, and imagination. On the other hand, the angels of Wilhelm's heart have fled away from reality because they accepted this representation. Suddenly they find this their true home. Now, then, they will sow in the clouds no longer. Reality, beneath its hard, limited outside, opens to them its divine bosom, and says, "Ye also are real: sow here."