Nevertheless, here are the first gleams of a genial appreciation of the _AEsthetik_ of Germany, that large-hearted discernment that grasps similitudes from the antipodes of Thought, and writes them upon its sunny equator. And there are appeals to those finer impulses and experiences of every feeling soul that manifest a sense, imperfect yet animated, of that marvelous sympathy that exists between all phases of life, whether in humanity or in external nature. His natural outbursts of feeling are rare, but delicious as _caviare_, with a certain quaver of piquancy. 'Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding, and night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.' Only a fantasy, and yet how he bends Nature to suit the curve of his own temperament. And who has not felt the involuntary exhilaration, appalling from its very depth, that possessed him, crossing a bare common, on a bleak October afternoon, sunless and chill, with gray winds sweeping by--'I was glad to the brink of fear.' An intense emotion is imprisoned in these words,--the irresistible intoxication of deep delight, the consciousness of an unbounded faculty for enjoyment, and a lurking but delicious dread of the lavish power of sensation cooped within the senses. Heine, in his 'Lutetia,' speaks of the 'secret raptures attendant upon the tremors of fear.' Still, Emerson's Nature is rather a Nature a la Pompadour, in powdered hair and jeweled stomacher and high-heeled slippers; not the dear green mother of our dreams, who was wooed by the bending heavens, and 'Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth from the mighty embracement; Thousand-fold tribes of dwellers, impelled by thousand-fold instincts, Filled, as a dream, the wide waters; the rivers sang on in their channels; Laughed on their shores the hoarse seas; the yearning ocean swelled upward; Young life lowed through the meadows, the woods, and the echoing mountains, Wandered bleating in valleys, and warbled in blossoming branches.' But Nature had been broached and Society was scandalized. Like the Chancellor in Faust, it mounted its tripod and solemnly proclaimed its verdict upon the inadmissible theory, so inadequately proved of the identity of Nature and Spirit. But '_was sagt_ mein Thales?' 'Natur und Geist! so spricht man nicht zu Christen: Desshalb verbrennt man Atheisten, Weil solche Reden hoechst gefaehrlich sind. Natur ist Suende, Geist ist Teufel; Sie hegen zwischen sich den Zweifel, Ihr miss-gestaltet Zwitterkind.'