when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. I ask not
for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or
Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provençal minstrelsy; I embrace the
common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give
me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future
worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the
firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the
boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;--show
me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence
of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in
these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle
bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal
law;[81] and the shop, the plow, and the ledger referred to the like
cause by which light undulates and poets sing;--and the world lies no
longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order:
there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and
animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith,[82] Burns,[83]
Cowper,[84] and, in a newer time, of Goethe,[85] Wordsworth,[86] and
Carlyle.[87] This idea they have differently followed and with various
success. In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope,[88] of
Johnson,[89] of Gibbon,[90] looks cold and pedantic. This writing is
blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less
beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far.
The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This
perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.
Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown
us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.