overlooked; and the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect,
as the realized Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace
matter,--as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some
upholsterer had put together! It could do no good, at present, to _speak_
much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it,
live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful pity;--a failure
to live at all, if we live otherwise!

But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the _Vates_,
whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither to
make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message; he is
to reveal that to us,--that sacred mystery which he more than others lives
ever present with. While others forget it, he knows it;--I might say, he
has been driven to know it; without consent asked of him, he finds himself
living in it, bound to live in it. Once more, here is no Hearsay, but a
direct Insight and Belief; this man too could not help being a sincere man!
Whosoever may live in the shows of things, it is for him a necessity of
nature to live in the very fact of things. A man once more, in earnest
with the Universe, though all others were but toying with it. He is a
_Vates_, first of all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and
Prophet, participators in the "open secret," are one.

With respect to their distinction again: The _Vates_ Prophet, we might
say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good and
Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the _Vates_ Poet on what the Germans call the
aesthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may call a revealer
of what we are to do, the other of what we are to love. But indeed these
two provinces run into one another, and cannot be disjoined. The Prophet
too has his eye on what we are to love: how else shall he know what it is
we are to do? The highest Voice ever heard on this earth said withal,