"Consequently, your Serapion died on the very name-day of the Saint whom he took himself to be! Come; I drink this cup to the memory of Serapion, saint and martyr, and do you all do likewise!" "'With all my heart!' said Cyprian, and the glasses clinked. "Looking at the subject all round," said Lothair, "and especially now that Theodore has so thoroughly stirred my bile with that horrible Krespel of his, I am quite reconciled to Cyprian's Serapion. More than that, I honour and reverence his insanity; for none but a grand and genuine poet could have been attacked by a madness of that particular form. I needn't advert to the circumstance--it's an old, well-worn story--that, originally, the same word was used to denote the poet and the seer; but it is certain that we might often doubt just as much of the existence of real poets as of that of genuine seers, recounting in their _extasis_ the wonders of a higher realm; or else why is it that so much poetry, by no means to be termed 'bad' (so far as its form and workmanship are concerned), affects us no more than some pale, faded picture, so that we are not carried away by it at all, and the gorgeousness of its diction only serves to increase the frost which it permeates us with? Why is this, but because the poet has never really _seen_ what he is telling us about: the events and incidents have never appeared to his mental vision, in all their joy, terror, splendour, majesty, gloom, and sadness, inspiring him, and setting him aglow, so that his inward fire blazes forth in words of lightning? It is useless for a poet to set to work to make us believe in a thing which he does not believe in himself, cannot believe in, because he has never really seen it. What can the characters of a poet of this sort--who (according to the old expression) is not at the same time a genuine seer--be but deceptive puppets, glued together out of heterogeneous stuff? Your hermit, dear Cyprian, was a true poet. He had actually seen what he described; and that was why he affected people's hearts and souls. Poor Serapion! Wherein did your madness consist? except that some hostile star had taken away your faculty of discerning that duplexity which is, really, the essential condition of our earthly existence. There is an inner world; and a spiritual faculty of discerning it with absolute clearness, nay, with the most minute and brilliant distinctness. But it is part of our earthly lot that it is the _outer_ world, in which we are encased, which is the lever that brings that spiritual faculty into play. The things of the inner world appear to us only inside the circle which is formed round us by the objects of the outer world, beyond which circle our spirits cannot soar, except in dim mysterious bodings--never; becoming distinct images--that such things exist. But you, happy hermit, lost sight of the outer world, and did not perceive the lever which set your inward