The early seers and poets had not attained to this sublime superciliousness of self-contempt; for this, of course, is a fruit to be borne only by the "progress of the species." They are still weak enough to believe in gods and godlike men, in spirit and inspiration, in the ineffable fulness and meaning of a noble life, in the cosmic relationship of man, in the _divineness_ of speech and thought. In their books man is placed in a large light; honor and estimation come to him out of the heavens; what he does, if it be in any profound way characteristic, is told without misgiving, without fear to be superfluous; he is the care, or even the companion, of the immortals. To go forth, therefore, from our little cells of criticism and controversy, and to enter upon the pages where man's being appears so spacious and significant,--where, at length, it is really _imagined_,--is like leaving stove-heated, paper-walled rooms, and passing out beneath the blue cope and into the sweet air of heaven. Quite this epic boldness and wholeness we cannot attribute to Goethe. He is still a little straitened, a little pestered by the doubting and critical optics which our time turns upon man, a little victimized by his knowledge of limitary conditions and secondary laws. Nevertheless, a noble man is not to his eye "contained between hat and boots," but is of untold depth and dimension. He indicates traits of the soul with that repose in his facts and respect for them which Lyell shows in spelling out terrestrial history, or Herschel in tracing that of the solar system. Observe how he relates the plays of a child,--with what grave, imperial respect, with what undoubting, reverential minuteness! He does not say, "Bear with me, ladies and gentlemen; I will come to something of importance soon." This is important,--the formation of suns not more so.