In this respect he stands in wide contrast to the prevailing tone of the time. It seems right and admirable that Tyndale should risk life and limb in learning the laws of glaciers, that large-brained Agassiz should pursue for years, if need be, his microscopic researches into the natural history of turtles; and were life or eyesight lost so, we should all say, "Lost, but well and worthily." But ask a conclave of sober _savans_ to listen to reports on the natural-spiritual history of babies and little children,--ask them to join, one and all, in this piece of discovery, spending labor and lifetime in watching the sports, the moods, the imaginations, the fanciful loves and fears, the whole baby unfolding of these budding revelations of divine uses in Nature,--and see what they will think of your sanity. You may, indeed, if such be your humor, observe these matters, nay, even write books upon them, and still escape the lunatic asylum,--_provided_ you do so in the way of pleasantry. In this case, the gravest _savant_, if he have children, may condescend to listen, and even to smile. But ask him to attend to this _in his quality of man of science_, and no less seriously than he would investigate the history of mud-worms, and you become ridiculous in his eyes. Goethe is guiltless of this inversion of interest. Truth of outward Nature he respects; truth of the soul he reverences. He can really _imagine_ men,--that is, can so depict them that they shall not be mere bundles of finite quantities, a yard of this and a pound of that, but so that the illimitable possibilities and immortal ancestries of man shall look forth from their eyes, shall show in their features, and give to them a certain grace of the infinite. The powers which created for the Greeks their gods are active in him, even in his observation of men; and this gives him that other eye, without which the effigies of men are seen, but never man himself. And because he has this divine eye for the inner reality of personal being, and yet also that eagle eye of his for conditions and limits,--because he can see man as central in Nature, the sum of all uses, the vessel of all significance, and yet has no "carpenter theory" of the universe,--and because he can discern the substance and the _revealing_ form of man, while yet no satirist sees more clearly man's accidental and concealing form,--because of this, history comes in him to new blood, regaining its inspirations without forfeiture of its experience. Carlyle has the same eye, but less creative, and tinctured always with the special humors of his temperament; yet the attitude he can hold toward a human personality, the spirit in which he can contemplate it, gives that to his books which will keep them alive, I think, while the world lasts.