so far from having any heroic quality, he seems always the malign fiend
sacrificing innocence to an impotent revenge. In all great creations of
art it is necessary that this consistency of beauty, virtue, reason, and
joy should he preserved.

It is true that the supremacy of law in this inward world, so
constituted, is less realized than in the physical world; but even in
the latter the wide conviction of its supremacy is a recent thing, and
in some parts of nature it is still lightly felt, especially in those
which touch the brain most nearly, while under the stress of exceptional
calamity or strong desire or traditional religious beliefs it often
breaks down. But if the order of the material universe seems now a more
settled thing than the spiritual law of the soul, once the case was
reversed; God was known and nature miraculous. It must be remembered,
too, in excuse of our feebleness of faith, that we are born bodily into
the physical world and are forced to live under its law; but life in the
spiritual world is more a matter of choice, at least in respect to its
degree; its phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our development and
growth, on our living habitually and intelligently in our higher nature,
the laws of which as communicated to us by other minds are in part
prophecies of experience not yet actual in ourselves. It is the
touchstone of experience, after all, that tries all things in both
worlds, and experience in the spiritual world may be long delayed; it is
power of mind that makes wide generalizations in both; and the
conception of spiritual law is the most refined as perhaps it is the
most daring of human thoughts.

The expansion of the conception of ideal literature so as to embrace
these other aspects, in addition to that of rational knowledge which has
thus far been exclusively dwelt upon, requires us to examine its nature