Has any one, at this end of the nineteenth century, a clear idea of what the poets of the ages called _Inspiration_? If no one have, I will describe it. With the least remainder of superstition in him a man would scarcely be able to put aside the idea that he was merely the Incarnation, the mouthpiece, the medium of overwhelming powers. The idea of Revelation in the mind describes exactly the state of affairs--that suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and fineness, something became visible and audible, something that shakes and pervades one to the depths. One hears--he does not seek; he takes--he does not ask who gives; like lightning gleams out a thought, of necessity, formed without hesitation--I have never had a choice. An ecstasy, whose colossal strain breaks in the middle with a stream of tears, in the course of which the step becomes, involuntary, now raging, now slow; a state in which one is completely beside himself, with the distinctest consciousness of countless shudderings and quiverings, even to the toes of his feet; a depth of joy in which all that is painful and somber serves, not as a contrast, but as conditioned, as demanded, as a necessary color in such an overflow of light; an instinct of rhythmic relations which overleaps vast spaces of forms; all happening in the highest degree involuntarily, but as if in a storm of sensations of freedom, of infinity, of power, of divinity.--This is my experience of Inspiration; I doubt not but that one must needs go back thousands of years to find one who might say, “It is also mine.” * * * * * Do you think that _I_ wrote that--I, Arthur Stirling? No, I did not write that. The man who wrote that is known to you as an atheist. * * * * * January 7th. When Zarathustra came into the next city, which lay beside the forest, he found in that place much people gathered together in the market; for they had been called that they should see a rope-dancer. And Zarathustra spoke thus unto the people: _“I teach ye the Over-man._ The man is something who shall be overcome. What have ye done to overcome him? “All being before this made something beyond itself: and you will be the ebb of this great flood, and rather go back to the beast than overcome the man? “What is the ape to the man? A mockery or a painful shame. And even so shall man be to the Over-man: a mockery or a painful shame. “Man is a cord, tied between Beast and Over-man--a cord above an abyss. “A perilous arriving, a perilous traveling, a perilous looking backward, a perilous trembling and standing still. “What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and no goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under. “I love them that know not how to live, be it even as those going under, for such are those going across.