It proceeded briefly to rehearse the theme of this the latest of the world-poets in the order of his coming, who was yet destined to take precedence of them all. Differentiating classic art from the romantic, and claiming for the poet of the _Reconciliation_ the foremost place in the nobler school, inasmuch that his poem is like a pool whose depths are so measureless that its surface is tranquil, and yet so clear that it becomes a mirror that faithfully reflects the features of all that gaze therein, it recounted how the poem treats the life of man in all its phases. The mighty theme commences with that unspeakable suffering by which Man was taught to speak, that strange ascension from the higher anthropoids to a partial rationalism, culminating in that stage of “Reason” which offered the ill-starred creature Man, in lieu of an ample garment for his solace, protection, and utility, a kind of ridiculous swaddling-clothes, in which he could neither walk nor yet inhabit himself with decency. It reveals Man, the Wayfarer, ever straining after that which he knows not how to attain, until worn out with the heat and dust and the bloody conflict of the battle, the unhappy Warrior-traveller commits himself, a tired, baffled, war-worn child of destiny, yet grateful in his weariness, to the arms of Earth, his mother, again. To the poet, Man’s terrestrial life, in the present stage of his development, is a progress through an eternal forest; and it submits itself to three phases--bewilderment, terror, pity. Through these he conducts the Warrior-Soul ever seeking for “truth,” ever engaged in a titanic struggle with his “reason”--that sword with which he wounds himself because he comprehends not how to use it rightly--yet ever seeking to reconcile the primal instinct of his own divinity with “the facts of experience” which in vain he strives to overthrow. He begins with Man’s childhood. When to the mocking amazement of Earth, his primitive mother, the heroic but ill-starred Warrior has wrested from Destiny the power of speech, of thought, of will to bear his head erectly, he forsakes his half-brothers, the beasts of the field, and in a spirit of wonder and inquiry fares forth until he comes to a great city. In its purlieus he grows bewildered by the numberless things he cannot understand, and by the reception of answers that he cannot adjust to his partial development. Yet the Warrior is ever sustained by the sense of his own prowess, and proud of that which it has already achieved, he believes that when it can address its questions to the Whole of that which lies before it, it will comprehend it all.