to the appetite for food. He makes it his business to see
things as if he saw them for the first time, and professes
astonishment on principle. But he has no leaning towards
mythology; avows his contempt for what he calls "unregenerate
poetry;" and does not mean by nature


"The smooth walks, trimmed hedges, butterflies, posies, and
nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with
its geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow,
that rolls through the illimitable areas, light as a feather
though weighing billions of tons."


Nor is this exhaustive; for in his character of idealist all
impressions, all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith,
astronomy, history, and religion, enter upon equal terms into
his notion of the universe. He is not against religion; not,
indeed, against any religion. He wishes to drag with a
larger net, to make a more comprehensive synthesis, than any
or than all of them put together. In feeling after the
central type of man, he must embrace all eccentricities; his
cosmology must subsume all cosmologies, and the feelings that
gave birth to them; his statement of facts must include all
religion and all irreligion, Christ and Boodha, God and the
devil. The world as it is, and the whole world as it is,
physical, and spiritual, and historical, with its good and
bad, with its manifold inconsistencies, is what he wishes to
set forth, in strong, picturesque, and popular lineaments,
for the understanding of the average man. One of his