God Himself when, in order to attain great ends, He exerts a direct influence upon an individual, and thus allows Himself an arbitrary interference (if we put the case we must use expressions that fit it) in the world's machinery, cannot protect His tool from being crushed by the same wheel which this individual has arrested for a moment or has turned in another direction. This is surely the principal tragic motif which underlies the history of the Maid of Orleans. A tragedy which should reflect this idea would produce a great impression through the glimpse it would afford into the eternal order of nature, which God Himself may not disturb with impunity. When the poet attempts to delineate characters by making them speak, he must be careful not to allow them to speak about their own inner life. All their utterances must relate to something external; only then does their inner nature come out vividly and expressively, for it fashions itself only in reflections of the world and of life. To depict two kindred characters one by means of the other, to have them mutually reflect one another without their becoming aware of it, would surely be the triumph of delineation. It is a masterly trait in the _Prince of Homburg_ that the suspicion that the Elector has had the Prince condemned to death, not so much on account of the act of overhastiness committed on the battlefield as for another reason, does not arise spontaneously in the Prince's soul, but is first awakened by Hohenzollern's questioning. A double process must take place in the mind of the true poet before it can evolve anything. The crude matter must be resolved into an idea, and the idea must condense again into a form. Man is the continuation of the act of creation, an eternally growing, never completed creation, which prevents the termination of the world and keeps it from congealing and hardening. It is highly significant (this thought led me to the one I have just expressed) that everything which exists as a human conception is never wholly and perfectly--only fragmentarily--embodied in nature, and everything which exists perfectly and completely in nature eludes human conception, man's own nature not excepted. Thus we know and define right and wrong, virtue and innocence (the latter as soon as we have lost it), but not life itself, etc. Where knowledge has been vouchsafed us, there nature requires our coöperation.