"Vespucci, on the other hand, was not only a cartographer, but sailed round South America, and discovered that the New World was not India. He seems to have been a good-natured, upright, and modest man. Toscanelli, his contemporary, is also said to have announced the existence of a new world, but that is not so certain." =A Circumnavigator of the Globe.=--The pupil said: "Can you resolve my discords?" "I will call you a circumnavigator of the globe. You have sailed round it, and returned to the point whence you set out. No one can go further than that. But you return with a freight of experience, knowledge, and wisdom. Therefore the journey was not in vain, or to speak more correctly, it has fulfilled its object. Max Muller, who at the time of the decadence was the scapegoat for all the atheists, concludes his history of religion thus: 'It is easy to say that the completest faith is a child's faith. Nothing can be truer. The older we grow, the more we learn to comprehend the wisdom of children's faith.' And in another place he says: 'To explain religion by referring it to a religious impulse, or a religious capacity, is merely to explain the known by the less known. The real religious impulse or instinct is the apprehension of the infinite.' Thank your misfortunes that you have arrived at the infinite. 'The fortunate do not believe that miracles still happen, for only in misery we recognise God's hand and finger, which leads good men to good.'" "Do you know who said that?" "No; is it Luther?" "No; it is Goethe in _Hermann and Dorothea._ And the 'great pagan' wrote in 1779 to Lavater: 'My God, to whom I have been ever faithful, has in secret richly blessed me. For my destiny is quite hidden from men; they can neither hear nor see at all, how it is determined.' The Lice-King omits such expressions when he wishes to incorporate Goethe among his slimy larvæ." =The Poet's Children.=--The teacher continued: "Moreover, as I have already told you, you are a poet, and must pass through your reincarnations here. You have a right to invent poetic personalities, and at every stage to speak the speech of the one you represent. Shakespeare has done so, whether he did it consciously, or whether life assigned him the various roles he played. At one time he is a cheerful optimist; at another, the misogynist Timon, or the world-despiser Hamlet; he is the jealous Othello, the amorous Romeo, so-and-so the panegyrist of women, and so-and-so the misogynist. I believe indeed that he has, by way of experiment, been the murderer Macbeth, and the monster Richard III. He utters the malignant speeches of the last with real relish. Every rascal may defend himself, and Shakespeare is his advocate.