will entertain with fiddlers and cream; then every guest leaves his
high desire with his hat, leaves himself behind, and descends to
fiddlers and cream. But men rise to associate; in sinking they separate;
and the good host must call us up, not drag us down to his feast. Goethe
knows how to spread the table with portfolios, architecture, music,
drawing, tableaux; but a great love, with its inevitable thought, makes
even these solvents superfluous. Goethe studies the cemetery, the
chapel, the school, the gallery, the burial-service, the
estate,--whatever is nearest. He finds astonishing values in labor,
trade, production, art, science, war. In his boyhood he built an altar
with his playthings and burned incense to Deity on a pile of shells and
stones. That act of worship foreshadowed his whole career; he took every
creature and thing from God's hand with reverent expectation, and never
rested till he had opened to some intent of the Maker therein. Things,
therefore, in his view are no longer empty and hollow like old cast-off
shoes, but pieces of sublime design. A beetle is sustained by earth,
air, fire, and water, needs the sun and the sea, winter and summer,
earth's orbit and parallax, needs whatever has been made, to set him on
his legs. He carries the world in little, and is a creeping black body
of the best.

Much more man is microcosmic and macrocosmic. Natural and supernatural
meet concealedly in the out-world, but openly in him, and his early
desires grow into a future surpassing all desire. The poet sees his
destiny in our wishes,--sees right and wrong, kindness and greediness,
deepening into incalculable grandeurs of heaven and hell. He sees the
man never yet arrived, but now arriving, to inhabit each breast. "Far
off his coming" shines. We have many little gleams of generosity; we
have conviction, and can strike for the right. Nature is a fixed
quantity, a solid; but life is reinforced by life. Truth begets truth,