poor human nature. As his customers came and gave their orders in his
shop; as his neighbours collected, and gossiped, and debated, and
quarrelled around his shop window; as his minister fumed and raged
against him in the pulpit; as the Council of Goerlitz sat and swayed,
passed sentence upon him, retracted their sentence, and again gave way
under the pressure of their minister, and pronounced another
sentence,--all this time Behmen was having poor human nature, to all its
joints and marrow, and to all the thoughts and instincts of its heart,
laid naked and open before him, both in other men and in himself. And
then, as always with Behmen, all this observation of men, all this
discovery and self-discovery, ran up into philosophy, into theology, into
personal and evangelical religion. In all that Behmen better and better
saw the original plan, constitution, and operation of human nature; its
aboriginal catastrophe; its weakness and openness to all evil; and its
need of constant care, protection, instruction, watchfulness, and Divine
help. Behmen writes on all the four temperaments with the profoundest
insight, and with the fullest sympathy; but over the last of the four he
exclaims: 'O hear me! for I know well myself what melancholy is! I also
have lodged all my days in the melancholy inn!' As I read that light and
elastic book published the other day, _The Life and Letters of Erasmus_,
I came on this sentence, 'Erasmus, like all men of real genius, had a
light and elastic nature.' When I read that, I could not believe my
eyes. I had been used to think of light and elastic natures as being the
antipodes of natures of real genius. And as I stopped my reading for a
little, a procession of men of real and indisputable genius passed before
me, who had all lodged with Behmen in the melancholy inn. Till I
remembered that far deeper and far truer saying, that 'simply to say man
at all is to say melancholy.' No: with all respect, the real fact is
surely as near as possible the exact opposite. A light, elastic, Erasmus-
like nature, is the exception among men of real genius. At any rate,