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Goethe's fine and luminous feeling for practical life, which has given such depth of richness and wisdom to his best prose writing, fills us with a delightful sense of satisfaction and adequateness; and yet why should it not leave us with a mind eagerly open for the larger and more inventive romance, in which nature is clothed with some of that awe and might and silent contemplation of the puny destinies of man, that used to surround the conception of the supernatural?
It is accom- panied, apparently, with parents and grandparents, and it fills the trains with little pale-faced lyceens, who gaze out of the windows with a longing, lingering air, not unnatural on the part of small members of a race in which life is intense, who are about to be restored to those big educative barracks that do such violence to our American appreciation of the oppor- tunities of boyhood.
At first my brain, like a dog in unfamiliar quarters, must turn itself round for a time or so before it lies down. This strange mystery of a world of which I have seen so little as yet a mountain slope, a twilit road, a traffic of ambiguous vehicles and dim shapes, the window lights of many homes fills me with curiosities. Outside this little bedroom is a world, a whole unimagined world.
The wick, which is composed of pulverized moss, is arranged along the front edge, and kept moistened by the oil that fills the lamp by tilting it forward the lamp being delicately poised, with this end in view, upon three sticks driven into the snow beneath it. If there be two women, they occupy both ends of the bed, each with her lamp in front of her.
For there is no question that the mind takes a supreme satisfaction in such an idealization of reality as Coleridge's picture of the swift tropical sunset, "At one stride comes the dark," or Emerson's picture of the slow New England sunrise, "O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire."
The window which fills this space is occupied by a representation of one subject only, the Virgin and Child in or rather sitting in front of the stable; Saint Joseph leaning on his staff and gazing at the Divine Infant; a knot of shepherds in adoration, some bringing gifts and others playing on bagpipes, exactly similar to the instruments still used in the Neapolitan Apennines; other figures in the middle distance; beyond these a delicious bit of mountain-landscape; "a glory" above; and in the arch of the window a half-figure representation of God the Father.
And you, pretty one, life blooms for you " "But I," interrupted Cleopatra, "I can admire all that is great; and does it not seem a bold and grand thing even to you, that the mighty idea that it is one single power that moves and fills the world, should be freely and openly declared in the sacred writings of the Jews an idea which the Egyptians carefully wrap up and conceal, which the priests of the Nile only venture to divulge to the most privileged of those who are initiated into their mysteries, and which though the Greek philosophers indeed have fearlessly uttered it has never been introduced by any Hellene into the religion of the people?
But when you let your thought down into the natural lumen which derives from space, will not these things be seen as paradoxes? and if you let it down far, will you not reject them? This is why it is said that the Divine fills all spaces of the universe, and why it is not said that God-Man fills them. For if this were said, the merely natural lumen would not assent.
The morality which has genuine authority exists inevitably and speaks autonomously in every common judgment, self-congratulation, ambition, or passion that fills the vulgar day.
What a sweet and touching sight! In my heart all was dark and desolate; but here, among you all, it is already beginning to feel lighter, and here, if anywhere, I shall recover what I lost in my other home. Happy child! Could you not fancy, as she stands there in the evening light, that the pure devotion which fills her soul, radiated from her?
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